“Significant amount of subpoenas” coming from January 6th House Committee
Right about now Kevin McCarthy is surely wishing he’d kept his three non-rejected picks on the January 6th House Committee. For that matter the Republican Senate is probably wishing it had approved a bipartisan January 6th Commission to begin with.
As the January 6th Committee now stands, with seven House Democrats and two House Republicans who all seem equally committed to getting to the truth of the Capitol insurrection, this isn’t going the way most other Republicans were hoping.
Adam Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans on the committee, told ABC News this weekend that “I would expect to see a significant amount of subpoenas.” This is notable because he’s surely not talking about merely subpoenaing low level Capitol invaders, most of whom are under indictment already. This is almost certainly a reference to subpoenaing high level decision makers in the Trump administration who set the stage for the attack, along with House and Senate Republicans who verbally incited the attack.
The kicker is that while the Democrats were always going to have majority subpoena control on this committee, there aren’t even any Republicans on the committee to raise a stink in protest. Republican members Kinzinger and Liz Cheney don’t agree with the Democrats on much, but they do agree on the importance of getting to the bottom of what really happened on January 6th. Cheney previously stated that Jim Jordan could be subpoenaed to testify.
January 6th Committee leader Bennie Thompson has also previously spoken about subpoenaing Donald Trump himself. Subpoena enforcement will be key – but Thompson has repeatedly signaled that he doesn’t intend to mess around when it comes to forcing witnesses to testify. He’s already stated that the committee will skip the customary step of asking witnesses to voluntarily testify, and will skip straight to the subpoenas.
