The House select committee investigating last year’s Capitol riot issued subpoenas Thursday to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and four other GOP lawmakers who declined to appear before the panel voluntarily.
Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said all five “have information relevant to our investigation into the attack on January 6th and the events leading up to it” and Thompson urged his colleagues to “do their patriotic duty … and cooperate with our investigation.”
In addition to McCarthy, the committee is ordering Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) to testify.
“I have not seen this subpoena. I guess they sent it to you guys before they sent it to me,” McCarthy told reporters Thursday. “Look, my view on the committee has not changed. They’re not conducting a legitimate investigation. It seems as though they just want to go after their political opponents.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) last year rejected the Republicans that McCarthy nominated to the committee, including Jordan, and instead appointed two vocal critics of former President Donald Trump — Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who routinely clashed with Trump on foreign policy.
The riot committee is likely to be disbanded in January if Republicans win the midterm elections in November — setting up a potentially tight window for the panel to complete its probe into Trump’s role in the rampage.
But it’s unclear if Democrats can actually force their Republican colleagues to testify about their interactions with Trump, including on the day of the riot, which disrupted certification of President Biden’s victory in the Electoral College.
If the five Republicans refuse to testify, the committee and full House would have to vote to hold them in contempt. The Justice Department then would have to decide on possible prosecution.
The Constitution grants some special protections to lawmakers. For example, the Speech or Debate Clause says they “shall not be questioned” about any speech or debate in the House — meaning the legal case may not be straightforward.
McCarthy harshly criticized Trump in the immediate aftermath of the riot and said that Trump acknowledged he bears some responsibility. In a conversation that recently leaked, he said he planned to tell Trump to resign. But McCarthy has since patched up his relationship with the ex-president.
Brooks, meanwhile, spoke at the large pre-riot rally headlined by the 45th president near the White House and urged the crowd to start “kicking ass” — before a wild mob of Trump supporters did exactly that while battling police officers and pillaging the Capitol.
Brooks and Trump recently had a falling out — with Trump yanking his endorsement of Brooks’ Senate candidacy and the congressman returning fire by claiming that Trump asked him to help reinstate him as commander-in-chief.
“The president has asked me to rescind the election of 2020,” Brooks said in March. “He always brings up, ‘we’ve got to rescind the election. We got to take Joe Biden down and put me in now’.”
The committee has subpoenaed a broad cross-section of Trump allies and Republican aides, some of whom say they had nothing to do with the events of Jan. 6.
More than 780 people have been arrested and charged with crimes in connection with the riot and the House voted in December to hold in contempt former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for declining to testify to the committee.
Meadows handed over nearly 9,000 pages of emails and text messages to the panel before cutting off contact. Those documents included desperate pleas to Meadows from journalists, politicians and even Donald Trump Jr. to get Trump to help calm the mob.
Trump’s former White House strategist Steve Bannon was indicted in November by a federal grand jury on two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to testify before the committee — the first such prosecution since 1983. Bannon was not a White House employee at the time of the riot.
The Justice Department usually ignores contempt votes. In 2012, the Republican-led House voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for declining to produce documents in the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal. Holder’s deputies declined to prosecute him.
Unlike Bannon, Meadows was a current White House employee at the time of the riot, which legal analysts say gives him a better legal argument than Bannon regarding executive privilege. Meadows has yet to face an indictment and it’s unclear if he ever will.
House Democrats and 10 Republicans voted to impeach Trump in January 2021 for allegedly inciting the riot with false claims of widespread voter fraud. Trump was acquitted by the Senate in a 57-43 vote, with seven Republicans finding him guilty — short of the two-thirds threshold required by the Constitution.
