I would have understood, though been endlessly annoyed, if the committee didn’t subpoena Trump, because he probably would have just ignored them. So what’s the point of subpoenaing him at the end of the hearings when they’re about to lose the House and possibly the Senate in a few weeks? Is it so it’s on record, but his refusal to show doesn’t get a lot of press? It’s a shame after Bannon’s sentencing that this wasn’t pursued earlier.
I think they wanted to start at the bottom (i.e. the individual rioters) and work their way up.
What @iiandyiiii said. There’s no point in bringing in the target of the investigation to give his side of the story until you know the whole story first. That way the target can’t make untrue statements without being challenged.
It’s how almost all investigations are conducted.
In general, you want to be putting questions to your primary suspect to which you already know the answer, so you build your knowledge of the case as far as you can before tackling him.
Particularly if said suspect is known to have a, shall we say antagonistic, relationship with the truth.
They built up the case and know the answers to every question that they would ask. They know damn well that he’ll never testify but they need to show that they made the effort to question him. The committee will make a criminal referral and make their final report, but they’ve already accomplished their main objective in getting the DOJ off its ass and investigating this goon.
They want him on the stand taking the fifth a hundred or so times right before the election. Isn’t November 4th the day he is to appear? Coincidence?
It’s important to note that Trump has been free to appear before the committee the entire time but has chosen not to. So if and when he says they haven’t given him a chance to tell his side of the story he is full of it, as usual.
If on the other hand the question is why have they not compelled him so we can get him thrown in jail for contempt like Steve Bannon, I would remind you that when it comes to criminal liability Trump has thus far been immune to everything. The documents case is a clear cut example. If you or I or anyone else on planet Earth left the White House with so much as a piece of used toilet paper that we were not supposed to have, the FBI would kick down our doors and haul us off to jail. Making the argument that the stolen property actually belonged to us or was somehow covered by attorney-client privilege would be laughed at and if we took that in front of a judge (not a hand-picked judge, not a “special master” and absolutely zero chance of an immediate appeal to the Supreme Court!) the judge would also laugh before tacking on a longer sentence for annoying the court.
But Trump gets his own justice system. Toddler fits bring the system grinding to a halt provided you are an ex-President with no regard for rules. In such a scenario, Trump says he doesn’t believe in the rule and everyone gives him the benefit of the doubt and starts asking why we have that rule in the first place. This will also happen with the subpoena when the Republicans dissolve this committee and free Trump from having to follow a rule that they will insist Democrats follow when they start their smear campaign against Garland and Hunter Biden and etc.
No. The 14th.
It’s after the elections.
Even if they lose the elections, the new congress doesn’t take office until January. There is still time to do stuff. Maybe not much time, but the committee isn’t going to be disbanded the day after the election.
They’ve done an unusually good job toming this for the upcoming election. Well done.
If anything, a lame duck House has nothing to lose. Especially folks like Cheney. “What are you going to do, vote me out of office?”
The committee’s role was to build a public case, providing the DOJ political cover for prosecuting Trump, political cover the DOJ is, in fact, using.
The entire thing was theater. It was supposed to be theater. And, now, at the end of Act 1… Law… the antagonist gets served with a form of comeuppance which will form the start of Act 2… Order… which will feature the DOJ’s/NYState/Georgia’s actual prosecution of Trump.
Agreed, but still … all signs were pointing toward a Trump subpoena back in July before the long recess, and last week’s session brought very little new information to light. ISTM they could have issued the subpoena in July, and now we’d be watching Trump’s testimony (or the consequences of his refusing to appear) instead of still wondering what’s gonna happen next.
(Plus, that subpoena combined with the Mar-a-Lago search a couple weeks later might have given Trump that heart attack he’s been courting for years, and all this would be academic.)
CHUNG CHUNG!
Yes, this.
But ALSO: Say the committee had subpoenaed Trump in June of this year, giving the process an additional four months to play out. (By June they already had a huge volume of testimony in the can, and likely a very good idea of the ‘whole story,’ as it were.)
That would mean that for all those months–months in which the Committee was making news about how effective they were and how much they were learning and how many Americans were paying attention to the hearings, etc., etc.–for all those months, the headlines would have been, instead:
They didn’t want those headlines. And those headlines would have been inevitable.
I agree, but the timing also suggests some political grandstanding. The last televised Comittee hearing was originally planned a week or so earlier, but was delayed due to hurricane Ian gobbling-up the news cycle. Clearly, the issuing of the subpoena could have been done at any time, but the calculus of doing it too soon, or too late (need to have imapct on the mid terms, need to get done while the Committee still has relevance) was carefully considered.
Yes, but only in the sense that a campaign rally is political grandstanding. As in, yes, of course it is, that’s the point. Their goal from the beginning, and it’s no secret, was to show the public how blatantly and egregiously crimes were committed. The only way to do that is by grandstanding, otherwise people aren’t going to pay attention.
Yeah, I’m on this side of the question.
One person’s “political grandstanding” is always going to be another person’s “smart messaging,” after all.
Delaying worked in Donnie’s favor. As it usually does.
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