The Jan. 6 Committee Subpoenaed Trump. What Now?
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 19 October 2022
⏱️ 62 minutes
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Summary
On October 13, the Jan. 6 committee closed what may be its final public hearing with a dramatic vote: unanimously, the committee members agreed to subpoena former president Donald Trump. So … what happens now? Will Trump actually testify? What happens if he defies the committee—would the Justice Department prosecute him for contempt of Congress?
To talk things through, Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic sat down with fellow senior editors Molly Reynolds and Jonathan Shaub and Lawfare editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes. They discussed the historical precedent for current and former presidents testifying before Congress and debated the likelihood that Trump will take the plunge and show up before the committee.
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Transcript
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| 0:29.0 | What does the subpoena say exactly? |
| 0:36.0 | You could imagine a very narrowly drawn subpoena that sort of excludes |
| 0:42.0 | anything that would be within the president's duties and asks only about |
| 0:47.0 | things that are necessarily sort of outside what a president should do. |
| 0:51.0 | And where that line is would be sort of difficult to discern. |
| 0:54.0 | But that would be I think the only way to kind of try to get around the subunity |
| 0:58.0 | and Congress almost never does that with subpoena. |
| 1:02.0 | It's almost always a very broad subpoena asking for sort of a bait, |
| 1:06.0 | a definition of what the questions are going to be. |
| 1:09.0 | That would be the way they kind of get around the doctrine in the way that |
| 1:12.0 | the DJ might consider a prosecution if there were some way to ensure that his testimony |
| 1:18.0 | was not related to his official duties. |
| 1:21.0 | Unfortunately, I think some of the questions, even they said the hearing, |
| 1:24.0 | and where was he doing during that time, they seem broad enough to include |
| 1:30.0 | official duties. |
| 1:32.0 | I'm Quinta Gerissick, senior editor at Law Fair, |
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