The Jan. 6 select committee doesn’t have much leverage over Trump — but it’s trying anyway.
The last time America heard from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, it was for a conclusory hearing summarizing months of work. The hearing built to a — perhaps literally — made-for-television moment: a committee vote subpoenaing former president Donald Trump to offer testimony.
This was in mid-October, a few weeks before a midterm election that both left and right correctly expected to lead to a new Republican House majority in January — a majority that would lead to the committee’s demise almost instantly. The subpoena vote, then, was both a punctuation mark aimed at raising the saliency of the question of Trump’s effort to retain power for midterm voters, and a final bank shot as the clock was ticking down.
That vote is instructive in the moment for a few reasons. First, that was one of a handful of tools the committee actually has at its disposal to try to effect change — one of a handful of tools that depend heavily on systems or timelines outside of the committee’s control for their power. The second reason it was instructive is that it will almost certainly end up not having made much of a difference.
On Monday, the committee will hold its FINAL_final_LastDraft.doc hearing on the riot and Trump’s effort to retain power after his 2020 presidential election loss. It is expected that Trump and potentially several of his allies will be the targets of criminal referrals from the committee — meaning that the committee will send formal recommendations to the Justice Department that those individuals be the subjects of criminal investigation or, potentially, indictment. The referrals could target people like John Eastman, an attorney who advised Trump, or Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff at the time of the riot.
