Jan. 6 Panel Unanimously Votes to Subpoena Ex-President Donald Trump

The U.S. House panel probing the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol unanimously voted Thursday to subpoena former President Donald Trump “to provide evidence as part of the committee’s investigation.”

The panel’s hearing—expected to be the last before next month’s midterm elections—largely focused on Trump’s role in the attack. In what critics now call his “Big Lie,” the former president repeatedly claimed, including in a speech the day of the insurrection, that Democrats stole the 2020 election.

Plans for the subpoena vote—which were initially reported by NBC News and Politico—and the result were welcomed by defenders of U.S. democracy.

“A subpoena of a former president shouldn’t be taken lightly. Neither should staging an attempted coup to change the outcome of an election,” said University of California, Berkeley professor and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

Moreover, along with the subpoena vote, the committee showed that “Trump Secret Service was warned that a mob was coming to the Capitol on January 6th to ‘kill people’ and did nothing to stop it,” noted Stand Up America executive director Christina Harvey. “Instead, Trump sicced the violent, armed mob on Congress and his own vice president.”

“As shocking as these revelations were, they were also just a reminder of what we’ve known from the beginning: President Trump was the ringleader of the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. He and his allies did everything they could to hold onto power… strong-arming state officials, the Justice Department, and Trump’s own vice president,” she said.

“Everyone involved in this national embarrassment must be held accountable, and the committee took the first step toward that goal with its subpoena of the former president,” Harvey added. “Though it is still unknown if this is the final time we hear from the committee, their work over the past year has proved the threat that Trump and his MAGA followers pose to our democracy and the importance of defeating them in November and beyond.”

Also, Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen and co-chair of the Not Above the Law Coalition, said that Thursday’s hearing “shows more clearly than ever that Trump was the mastermind of the insurrection and the multitudinous efforts to sabotage our democracy.”

“The committee’s subpoena is an important step to hold Trump accountable for the thwarted coup that he personally led,” she added. “He must comply.”

Originally published at Commondreams.org.