WASHINGTON (AP) – The House Committee on Jan. 6 investigated the Uprising Interviewed up to 1000 people. But the nine -member panel has yet to meet the two most prominent players at events that day: former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence.
At the conclusion of the Investigation and Planning Panel of a series of hearings in June, committee members discussed whether to call the two people whose dispute they needed to prove. Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election He is at the center of the attack. Trump lobbied Pence for several days, if not weeks, to exercise his ceremonial role, which led to the blocking or postponement of Biden’s certification on Jan.6. Pence refused and that day the rebels stormed the building. He demanded his execution.
There are reasons to call one or both. The committee wants to be as thorough as possible, and critics will certainly reveal that if they don’t even try. But some panel MPs said they got all the information they needed without Trump and Pence.
Nearly a year has passed since their extensive investigation The most heinous attack on the Capitol in more than two centuries, the Chamber Commission questioned hundreds of witnesses and received more than 100,000 documents. Interviews were conducted in public offices and private zoom sessions in anonymous federal offices.
The chairman of the Democratic Party, Mississippi lawmaker Benny Thompson, said in early April that the committee confirmed many of the allegations made against Trump and Pence without their testimony. He said that at the time there was “no effort on the part of the committee” to call Pence, but discussions have continued ever since.
Speaking to Pence, Thompson said the panel was “initially considered important” for him to call, but “we knew a lot that day – we knew the people he tried to change his mind to subject. Counting and everything else, what do we need? “
Thompson added that many of the people interviewed were people we were not on the original list.
The council, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, said the evidence gathered was enough to link Trump to federal crime.
Most of the evidence released by the committee so far comes from White House aides and staff, including anonymous witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson, Trump’s former White House Special Assistant, and Greg Jacobs, Pence’s chief adviser. . In the vice president’s office. The panel also contained thousands of messages from Trump’s newest chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and spoke with the former president’s two sons, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., who were with their father on the day of attack. .
Along with hundreds of others, the committee also interviewed Jared Kushner, a former White House aide, Ivanka’s wife Alice Farah, a former communications director, and several aides to Pence, including Chief of Staff Mark Short. and National Security Advisor Kate Kellogg. Former White House spokesmen Kaylee McCann and Stephanie Grisham, as well as former senior adviser Stephen Miller, also appeared.
There are still questions Trump and Pence can answer, including the one they discussed on the morning of Jan.6, when Trump filed the latest motion to seek an election pension when he conducted an electoral college tally in Congress. . Lawmakers have documented most of Trump’s call, but not what Pence said in response.
Hours after Trump and Pence spoke, the vice president issued a statement saying he had no right to object to the vote count. But the president did not give up and continued to put public pressure on Pence during his massive rally outside the White House and then on Twitter, even as his supporters stormed the Capitol.
However, the two former leaders are unlikely to speak to the committee and it is unclear if they will cooperate.
Although Pence has not yet commented on the committee’s work, Trump will certainly be a rude witness. He resisted court investigations, demonized the television commission, and tried to assert executive privilege in the White House newspapers and in all his conversations with his aides, requests that were inevitably no longer related to Pence’s phone call in the morning.
Additionally, summoning a former president or vice president to testify at a congressional investigation is a rare, if not unprecedented, step that can lead to serious legal hurdles and political repercussions.
The Jan. 6 committee looked only at what it found, mostly in court, where the transcripts were used.
The committee’s latest presentation revealed part of the interviews with Hutchinson, which took place in February and March of this year. This testimony provided new evidence of the involvement of GOP lawmakers in Trump’s attempts to repeal the 2020 election, including the White House meeting where the president’s attorneys reported that the drafting of a list of alternative voters who will declare Trump the winner. “reasonably legal”.
Another court action revealed testimony from Jacob, who was Pence’s chief counsel. In a series of emails, Jacob repeatedly told attorney John Eastman, who worked with Trump, that Pence could not interfere with his ceremonial duties and suspended the certification of voters ’votes. Jacob told Istman that the legislative framework he established was exactly what it was “essentially fully composed”.
Meadows texts were also published, describing how people in Trump’s orbit were asked to strongly condemn the attack on the Capitol as it unfolded. The request came from Trump’s children, members of Congress, and even Fox News presenters.
“Only now did he find out. “He walked away and failed,” Donald Trump Jr. said. in the Meadows as protesters stormed the perimeter of the Capitol.
Source: Huffpost
