Next steps for Jan. 6 House committee investigating attack on the Capital

The House select committee on Jan. 6 grabbed the nation’s attention again last week with its first public session after a two-month hiatus.

In an extraordinary step, the nine-member bipartisan panel voted unanimously to subpoena former President Donald Trump — a final effort to get the full story of the Capitol insurrection as the panel wraps up its work by the end of the year.

The attempt to compel Trump’s testimony comes as the committee is tying together multiple investigative threads and compiling its final report. The panel is only authorized through this Congress, which ends on Jan. 3.

A look at what’s next as the panel sprints to its finish:

Now that a subpoena has been authorized by the panel, it must be delivered in writing to Trump. That step, expected early next week, will set a date for an interview and lay out requests for documents.

Trump and his lawyers will then decide how to respond. He could comply, negotiate with the committee, announce he will defy the subpoena or ignore it altogether. He could also go to court and try to stop it.

If Trump doesn’t comply, the panel will have to weigh a vote’s practical and political implications on holding him in contempt of Congress. If the full House voted to recommend such a charge, the Justice Department would then review the case.

[ Trump’s troubles worsen: 6 legal landmines facing the ex-president ]

The panel will also pursue efforts to get other Trump allies to come forward as well as working to obtain more evidence, including text messages between Secret Service agents that were supposedly erased during a pre-planned tech upgrade.

The committee also plans to release a final report, which it hopes will provide a historical record of Jan. 6 and offer suggested legislative solutions.

If Trump decides to testify, the whole point would be to speak out to his tens of millions of supporters, presumably on live television in a public hearing before the committee.

Although the twice-impeached president continues to insist that he is eager to speak publicly about Jan. 6, he’s been pleading the Fifth Amendment in other legal controversies.

The committee is still talking to lawyers for former Vice President Mike Pence, as it has been for months. But it is unclear whether the lawmakers will subpoena the vice president or ask him for testimony.

Several of Pence’s aides have talked to investigators, some providing great detail about his movements and state of mind as he resisted Trump’s pleas to object to the certification of electoral votes that day and try to overturn their defeat to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Video shown at the committee’s final hearing before the midterm elections showed Pence coordinating with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer for help as the rioters were inside the building, some of them calling for Pence’s execution. The leaders were working with security officials to ensure that they could return to the Capitol and certify Biden’s victory.

The committee will also have to decide whether to refer any allegations of crimes to the Justice Department. While federal prosecutors are conducting their own investigations into Jan. 6 and Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, the congressional committee has its separate, massive trove of evidence.

Lawmakers on the panel have hinted multiple times over the past year that they will issue criminal referrals. At the hearing on Thursday, Cheney, the committee’s Republican vice chairwoman, said that the panel “may ultimately decide” to do so. She said they have “sufficient information to consider criminal referrals for multiple individuals.”

While such a referral would not force any action, it would put political pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland as the department pursues its own probes.

The two Republicans on the committee played critical roles on the panel and paid a heavy political price for bucking Trump.

Cheney lost her GOP primary in a landslide, and Kinzinger chose to retire from Congress after his district was effectively eliminated in redistricting.

So neither one will be in Congress come Jan. 1.

Cheney, who has repeatedly delivered stinging rebukes to Trump, says she is still considering a possible long-shot presidential campaign in 2024 or other steps to prevent Trump from ever returning to the White House.

Kinzinger has also said he is considering challenging Trump in a GOP presidential primary if the ex-president runs as expected.

The panel’s expected final action will be a massive report laying out evidence, findings and legislative recommendations to ensure nothing like Jan. 6 ever happens again. But it’s unclear how much of its investigative material will be released to the public.

In one of eight hearings last summer, Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, another Democratic member, said, “We have only shown a small fraction of what we have found.”

Lawmakers have made clear that the report will lay out what they view as the stakes for the country as many Republicans still falsely claim that the 2020 election was stolen and as Trump considers another run in 2024.

“With every effort to excuse or justify the conduct of the former president, we chip away at the foundation of our republic,” Cheney said at the hearing.

With News Wire Services