WASHINGTON (AP) – A House of Representatives commission investigating the January 6 uprising has interviewed nearly 1,000 people. But the nine-member commission has not yet spoken to the two most prominent players in the day, former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence.
As the investigation closes and the commission plans a series of hearings in June, committee members are discussing whether to call the two men, whose conflict over whether to prove Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election was at the center of the attack. Trump has been pressuring Pence for days, if not weeks, to use his ceremonial role as chairman of the Jan. 6 census to try to block or delay Biden’s certification. Pence refused to do so, and rebels who stormed the building that day called for his hanging.
There are reasons to call one or both. The Commission wants to be as thorough as possible, and critics will certainly pounce if they do not even try. But some committee lawmakers say they’ve gotten all the information they need without Trump and Pence.
Nearly a year after their extensive investigation into the worst attack on the Capitol in more than two centuries, a House committee of representatives questioned hundreds of witnesses and received more than 100,000 pages of documents. The interviews were conducted out of the public eye in obscure federal office buildings and private Zoom sessions.
Democrat Chair Mississippi Representative Benny Thompson said in early April that the committee had managed to confirm many of the statements attributed to Trump and Pence without their testimony. He said at the time “there was no effort on the part of the commission” to call Pence, although discussions have been going on about this potentially ever since.
Speaking to Pence, Thompson said the band “initially thought it would be important” to call him, but “there are many things on this day that we know – we know the people who tried to get him to change his mind about number and all that, so what do we need? ”
Many of the people interviewing, Thompson added, “are people we didn’t have on the original list.”
The panel, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, said the evidence it gathered was enough to link Trump to a federal crime.
Much of the evidence the commission has published so far comes from White House aides and officials – including little-known witnesses such as Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump White House special assistant, and Greg Jacob, Pence’s chief adviser in the cabinet. of the Vice President. The panel also has thousands of texts from Trump’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and spoke with two of the former president’s children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., who were with their father on the day of the attack.
Among others, the committee interviewed former White House staffer Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s wife, former communications director Alice Farah and a number of Pence aides, including his chief of staff Mark Short and his national security adviser Keith Kellogg. Former White House spokeswomen Kaylee McEnnany and Stephanie Grisham also appeared, as did former senior political adviser Stephen Miller.
There are still questions Trump and Pence could answer, including what they said on the morning of Jan. 6, when Trump made his last request for Pence to cancel the election when he chaired the Electoral College in Congress. Lawmakers were able to document most of the end of Trump’s conversation, but not what Pence said in response.
In the hours after Trump and Pence spoke, the vice president issued a statement saying he had no authority to object to the vote count. But the president did not back down and continued to publicly pressure Pence at his mass rally in front of the White House and then on Twitter, even after his supporters stormed the Capitol.
However, it is unlikely that the two former leaders will speak to the committee – and it is unclear whether they would cooperate at all.
While Pence has not yet commented on the commission’s work, Trump would certainly be a hostile witness. He fought the court investigation, demonized the television committee and tried to defend the privilege of the executive over White House documents and all the conversations he had with his aides – demands that will surely relate to his morning conversation with Pence.
In addition, calling on a former president or vice president to testify in a congressional inquiry is a rare, if not unprecedented, move that could face major legal hurdles and backfire politically.
Since January 6, the Commission has only looked at what it has found, especially in court documents where excerpts from transcripts have been used.
Recent documentation from the commission revealed parts of interviews with Hutchinson conducted in February and March this year. These testimonies provided new evidence of Republican lawmakers’ involvement in Trump’s efforts to cancel the 2020 election, including a White House meeting at which the president’s lawyers advised that an alternative voter list declare Trump the winner. is not “legal sound.”
Another court document reveals the testimony of Jacob, who was Pence’s attorney general. In a series of emails, Jacob repeatedly told attorney John Eastman, who works with Trump, that Pence could not interfere in his ceremonial role and stop the certification of electoral votes. Jacob told Eastman that the legal framework he was proposing to make was “essentially entirely fictional.”
Meadows’ texts are also revealing, detailing how people in Trump’s orbit are asking him to forcibly condemn the attack on the Capitol as it unfolds. The requests came from Trump’s children, members of Congress and even Fox News presenters.
“He must lead now. “It went too far and got out of hand,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote to Meadows as protesters violated the security perimeter of the Capitol.
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The correspondent of the Congress of the PA, Lisa Mascaro, contributed to this report.
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