It’s time for Jan. 6 panel to decide: Call Trump or Pence
WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection has interviewed nearly 1,000 people. But the nine-member panel has yet to talk to the two most prominent players in that day’s events — former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence.
As the investigation winds down and the panel plans a series of hearings in June, members of the committee are debating whether to call the two men, whose conflict over whether to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election win was at the center of the attack. Trump pressured Pence for days, if not weeks, to use his ceremonial role presiding over the Jan. 6 count to try to block or delay Biden’s certification. Pence refused to do so, and rioters who broke into the building that day called for his hanging.
There are reasons to call either or both of them. The committee wants to be as thorough as possible, and critics are sure to pounce if they don’t even try. But some lawmakers on the panel have argued that they’ve obtained all the information they need without Trump and Pence.
Nearly a year into their wide-ranging investigation into the worst attack on the Capitol in more than two centuries, the House committee has interviewed hundreds of witnesses and received more than 100,000 pages of documents. Interviews have been conducted out of the public eye in obscure federal office buildings and private Zoom sessions.
The Democratic chairman, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, said in early April that the committee has been able to validate a lot of the statements attributed to Trump and Pence without their testimony. He said at that time there was “no effort on the part of the committee” to call Pence, though there have been discussions since then about potentially doing so.
Speaking about Pence, Thompson said the panel had “initially thought it would be important” to call him, but “there are a lot of things on that day we know — we know the people who tried to get him to change his mind about the count and all of that, so what is it we need?”
A lot of the people they are interviewing, Thompson added, “are people we didn’t have on the original list.”
The panel, comprised of seven Democrats and two Republicans, has said that the evidence it has compiled is enough to link Trump to a federal crime.
Much of the evidence the committee has released so far has come from White House aides and staff — including little-known witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson, a former special assistant in the Trump White House, and Greg Jacob, who served as Pence’s chief counsel in the vice president’s office. The panel also has thousands of texts from Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and has talked to two of the former president’s children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., who were with their father the day of the attack.