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The House select committee investigating the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan.6 is ready to urge federal prosecution of former Donald Trump aides who refuse to comply with subpoenas, a key member of the panel.
Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, Strategist Steve Bannon and Pentagon Assistant Kash Patel are defying subpoenas for documents and testimony, under instructions from the former President.
Among fears that the panel will not take any legal action to enforce its will, Adam Schiff, a member of the panel as well as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, spoke to CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.
The Jan. 6 committee, he said, “wants to make sure these witnesses come to testify, and we are prepared to go ahead and urge the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who fails to act. legitimate duty ”.
Schiff also praised the Biden administration’s decision not to invoke executive privilege over documents relating to the attack on the Capitol.
The riot, around which five people including a police officer died, followed a rally near the White House in which Trump urged his supporters to “fight like hell” to reverse his electoral defeat.
Schiff said he hoped the House committee would see such documents “very soon”.
“I applaud the Biden administration for not asserting executive privilege,” he said, “not trying, because it protects its own prerogative, to deprive the American people of all the facts. So hats off to the administration.
“We should, I think, get these documents soon because the incumbent president has the first word on executive privilege.”
Friday, in a letter Announcing their client’s decision not to comply with his subpoena, Bannon’s attorneys attempted to assert executive privilege themselves.
Observers underline this executive privilege applies to communications involving the president whom the White House wishes to keep confidential – but although Trump was in power then, Bannon was not working for him.
Trump repeated the lies about voter fraud that fueled the attack at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday. Two high-ranking Republicans, Senator Chuck Grassley and Governor Kim Reynolds, stood beside him.
Referring to a majority report from the Senate Judiciary Committee this week on how Trump lobbied his acting attorney general ahead of the Capitol attack, Schiff said: “We saw Grassley [the senior Republican on the judiciary committee] in Iowa yesterday, unable to condemn the president’s efforts to get the Justice Department to overturn the election.
Referring to Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the Republican House Whip, Schiff pointed out “another Republican leader unable to recognize that the election was not stolen”.
On Fox News Sunday, Scalise refuse three times to tell if he believed the election had been stolen.
“It is these personal surrenders that put our country at risk,” Schiff said, adding that the Republican Party “is now an autocratic sect around Donald Trump … not interested in governing.”
Trump’s rally in Iowa was part of a shadow campaign. The former president remains eligible to run for the White House because enough Republican senators remained loyal in his second impeachment trial, on incitement to attack the Capitol, to avoid conviction. But Trump has not officially declared a race.
Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, said the American people should see Trump’s aides testify under oath in Congress.
“When you consider these were people appointed by Trump,” he said, of the events leading up to the January 6 rally described in the Senate Judiciary Committee report, “people who are ready to go straight to the chalk line, and in my opinion even on top of that when these people saw this as extravagant and illegal and something that they don’t give up before participating, it shows just how this has gone crazy.
Referring to Jeffrey Clark, a senior Justice Department attorney whose willingness to help Trump was underscored in the Senate report, Whitehouse said, “Then we move on to the next question, ‘OK, how did this- has it been organized? Was he really just a little guy from the Department of Justice with a crazy idea? I doubt.”
Observers, including comedian Bill Maher, have warned of a “slow coup,” short for the processes by which Republicans at the state level have since 2020 decided to change election and election laws and install elections. sympathetic officials in positions that monitor and certify elections.
Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, author of a revealing book about her former boss, has also appeared on NBC.
She said that if Trump “runs again in 2024, he won’t have any safeguards because he will never have to worry about being re-elected, so he will do whatever he wants.” He will hire whoever he wants. And I think that includes the Jan 6 Spirit folks… imagine who he might put in the DoJ in 2024, knowing that he has no consequences there.
When asked if Trump would “destroy democracy,” Grisham said: “I think it will be a very terrifying time.
“I think it will be nothing more than revenge, retaliation and how he can benefit from it. There will be pardons. I think there will be some very draconian policies that will go way too far. So I think if he’s re-elected it’s going to be a really, really scary time. “
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