The January 6 Committee issued a subpoena to President Trump on Friday, demanding that he answer for what the panel described as his attempt to “overturn an election and obstruct the peaceful transition of power.”
The subpoena – approved by the Committee at the end of its hearing last week – requires Trump to appear for a deposition before committee staff on Nov. 14, and to produce records by Nov. 4.
“In short, you were at the center of the first and only effort by any U.S. President to overturn an election and obstruct the peaceful transition of power, ultimately culminating in a bloody attack on our own Capitol and on our Congress itself,” the Committee told Trump in the subpoena.
Unlike many of the other subpoenas the committee has issued, the panel included the schedule of records that Trump is required to provide.
That document suggests that the committee believes that Trump was an avid user of the encrypted communications app Signal during his effort to subvert the election result. Signal comes with a commonly used feature that allows users to set their messages to auto-delete within days, hours, or seconds of receipt.
The panel wants Trump to provide records sent through Signal that refer “to the destruction of materials that previously existed and that would have been covered by any part of this subpoena.” Trump also is required to identify “every telephone or communications device” that he used from Nov. 3, 2020 to January 20, 2021.
The subpoena focuses in part on people that the investigation interviewed who invoked their right against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment in response to questions about their interactions with Trump.
That list includes Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and Kelli Ward. Attorney John Eastman and wannabe crony attorney general Jeff Clark are also included.
The panels wants broad categories of records from Trump, spanning many allegations that have been made against him regarding the planning of the insurrection and the broader attempt to subvert the 2020 election.
They include Signal communications involving Trump and members of far-right militia groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, records regarding the DOJ and the 2020 presidential election, records relating to an effort to “encourage or summon” people to come to D.C. on January 6, and efforts to contact witnesses who appeared before the panel, to name a few.
The committee appears to be following up on its public allegations of witness tampering, in a long item that reads as follows:
The panel said in its letter that it has interviewed more than one thousand witnesses during its investigation and reviewed more than one million documents. It laid out a list of components of Trump’s efforts to block the election result, including lying about fraud in the 2020 election, trying to hijack the DOJ to invalidate the results, pressuring state officials and lawmakers to overturn results in their states, and “summoning tens of thousands of supporters to Washington and, knowing they were angry and some were armed, sending them to the Capitol.”
Trump is incredibly unlikely to comply with the subpoena, and has already indicated that he will not do so.
If he does, the committee said that he will face questioning from the panel’s professional staff – a team that includes former federal prosecutors.
But as a document, the subpoena stands as a reminder of the stunning and anomalous lengths to which Trump went to avoid conceding defeat in the 2020 election. It also speaks to a strange quality of his attempt to block the peaceful transfer of power: while it all played out in the open for all to see, much of went on remains unknown to the broader public.
Read the subpoena here:
