The public deserves a chance to know what its president was doing in a pivotal moment.
The House Select Committee on January 6 ended what may be its final public hearing today with what is almost certainly a futile gesture: The members voted unanimously to subpoena former President Donald Trump for testimony and documents about his effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election and his incitement of a mob that attacked the Capitol.
The odds that they will get their way are effectively zero. Trump will surely fight the subpoena, just as many of his associates have resisted the committee’s demands. One of them, Steve Bannon, was even convicted for contempt of Congress. Whether or not the committee could compel Trump’s testimony in the abstract—and the legal and constitutional questions are complicated—doing so requires time that the committee likely doesn’t have. If Republicans retake the House in the midterm elections, the liquidation (or appropriation) of the committee will be one of their first orders of business.
But what is likely to happen, and what is legally enforceable, are not the same as what is right. The American people deserve to hear from Trump.
Much of today’s hearing was a summary of what the panel has laid out in previous sessions, arranged to make the case that Trump had a premeditated plan to contest the election and declare victory, no matter the results; that he knew he had lost and claimed victory anyway; that he lied in claiming election fraud; that he had a role in putting together the violent mob that assembled in Washington on January 6; and that he encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol in full awareness that they were armed and would do harm.
Whether or not it would be sufficient to convict Trump in a court of law, where prosecutors would have to prove his mental state, the case the committee put together was persuasive by any commonsense standard.
