The panel plans to produce a definitive account of Trump’s actions and to propose laws that will prevent future Presidents from interfering in the Electoral College vote count. In a court hearing last week, Douglas Letter, a lawyer for the committee, said that investigators are seeking White House documents dating back to April, 2020, to help determine whether Trump engaged in a months-long effort to discredit the results if he lost. “We think, maybe, this all ties in with . . . the fomenting of it, building a groundswell of feeling that this election was going to be tainted,” Letter said. Timothy Mulvey, the committee’s communications director, told me that most witnesses called are coöperating. “Even among former Administration officials,” he said, “very few have flatly refused to comply with a subpoena.” He added, about Trump’s legal attempts to block the investigation, “The former President’s aim is to delay and impede our probe, but the committee’s work will nonetheless continue to move forward quickly.”
Stephen Gillers, a professor of law at New York University, said that Attorney General Garland may wait for higher courts to rule on Trump’s legal claims, but he believes that Garland will eventually prosecute Bannon. Gillers pointed out that if Bannon is not charged, those who were subpoenaed this week might be encouraged to try waiting out the investigation. “Garland knows that,” Gillers said, adding, “Everything we know about his devotion to the rule of law makes me confident that he will not allow that to happen.”
Ilya Somin, a libertarian legal scholar at George Mason University, predicted that the higher courts will uphold the committee’s right to subpoena individuals significantly involved in the events leading up to January 6th. “It seems to me that it should be a no-brainer, that Congress should be able to subpoena” witnesses, he said, particularly those who may have “played a role in an attack on Congress.”
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