As Trump Issues 'Sharply Self-Incriminating' Subpoena Response, DOJ Urged to Act

As former President Donald Trump faced an onslaught of criticism and ridicule over his “rambling” 14-page response Friday to a subpoena from the U.S. House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack, calls for action by the Department of Justice continued to mount.

The bipartisan panel voted unanimously to subpoena Trump at the end of Thursday’s hearing—which was the ninth that the committee has held publicly since June and is likely going to be the last before next month’s midterm elections.

Throughout the hearings, “the evidence has proven” that “in a staggering betrayal of his oath, Donald Trump attempted a plan that led to an attack on a pillar of our democracy,” Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) declared Thursday. “It’s still hard to believe. But the facts and testimony are clear, consistent, and undisputed.”

Trump’s response to the subpoena, said former federal prosecutor and NBC News legal analyst Glenn Kirschner, “is powerfully incriminating evidence that will be introduced against him when he faces prosecution. And those who helped him draft it are co-conspirators.”

Trump’s letter to the panel spans four pages but includes a 10-page appendix featuring photos and bullet-point lists attacking the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Noting that Trump’s response “doubles down on the bogus claim that he won the election and on siding with the violent insurrectionists,” Noah Bookbinder of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said that “he not only tried to overturn an election and incited insurrection, he is still doing it.”

Bookbinder and his group also shared Philip Bump’s Washington Post column about Trump’s letter, which he wrote “was exactly what you would have expected.”

Highlighting that Trump used the term “fraud” many times, Bump argued that “what hinders Trump’s response, of course, is that there was no rampant fraud in the 2020 election. This is by now so concretely established—following nearly two years of desperate digging and countless tennis matches of debunking and rebunking—that it barely merits lengthy examination.”

Several federal lawmakers said after the committee’s vote that, in the words of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), “Donald Trump must testify before Congress.”

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) also demanded “the former occupant of the White House” testify about “his role in inciting the violent, white supremacist attack on our democracy,” while Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) called the subpoena an “an important step” to bring to justice “everyone involved in this attack on democracy—including the former president.”

Some, such as Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), even said that if Trump “refuses to comply, he must be held in contempt of Congress.”

However, some experts don’t believe the committee will be able to force Trump to testify, given that its work could end in early January, depending on which party wins control of Congress next month. Notably, the panel’s GOP vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, lost her primary race against a Trump-backed candidate, and its only other Republican, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, is leaving office after this term.

Originally published at Commondreams.org.

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