WASHINGTON — In deciding to take the highly unusual step of issuing subpoenas to 5 Republican members of Congress, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack concluded that attempting to compel their testimony was necessary enough to justify an escalatory step involving their colleagues.
All five of the Republicans subpoenaed on Thursday have previously refused to seem voluntarily before the committee. Probably the most distinguished of them, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, is his party’s leader within the House and in line to grow to be speaker if Republicans win control of the chamber in November. He has sought legal advice in recent months on tips on how to fight a subpoena, though he has yet to say how he’ll reply to the panel’s motion.
However the committee has made clear that it believes all five can have information that is essential to its efforts to document efforts by President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn the outcomes of the 2020 election, which culminated within the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a pro-Trump mob.
Listed below are the topics that the committee could possibly be concerned about hearing about from each of the five Republicans.
Representative Kevin McCarthy
The committee is in search of to query Mr. McCarthy about conversations he had with Mr. Trump during and after the attack about his culpability within the assault and what needs to be done to deal with it. The committee has also suggested that Mr. Trump, whose political support is important to Mr. McCarthy, can have influenced the congressman’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation.
Mr. McCarthy has acknowledged stepping into a heated argument with Mr. Trump throughout the Capitol attack, by which the president appeared to side with the rioters as they were tearing through the grounds.
In response to Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Washington Republican who has said that Mr. McCarthy recounted the exchange to her, Mr. Trump ignored Mr. McCarthy’s pleas to call off the rioters and sided with them as a substitute, saying, “Well, Kevin, I assume these individuals are more upset in regards to the election than you might be.”
Interest in the main points of those conversations has only increased in light of leaked audio by which Mr. McCarthy told colleagues that Mr. Trump had expressed feeling partly chargeable for the attack.
The audio, obtained by The Latest York Times and released in April, showed Mr. McCarthy recounting an exchange with the previous president, by which he claimed Mr. Trump had been relatively contrite about how his language regarding the election might need contributed to the riot.
“Does he feel bad about what happened? He told me he does have some responsibility for what happened, and he’d must acknowledge that,” Mr. McCarthy said within the recording.
Earlier, Mr. McCarthy had told colleagues that he was going to push Mr. Trump to resign.
Representative Scott Perry
The committee first publicly approached Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania in December with a letter requesting information, within the panel’s first formal try and interview a sitting member of Congress.
Committee members have argued that Mr. Perry, who leads the deeply conservative House Freedom Caucus, was one in all most important architects behind a plan to put in Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, because the acting attorney general after he appeared sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s false allegations of widespread voter fraud.
Mr. Clark appeared desperate to pursue various conspiracy theories about hacked voting booths and other types of election fraud, in addition to to pressure state elections officials to overturn leads to Georgia.
Committee members and investigators have said that Mr. Perry introduced Mr. Clark and the previous president. They’ve also found evidence that Mr. Perry was regularly in contact with Mark Meadows, the previous White House chief of staff, over encrypted messaging services within the weeks leading as much as Jan. 6.
After the election, Mr. Perry helped assemble a dossier of purported instances of voter fraud and in addition encouraged Mr. Trump’s supporters to participate within the march on the Capitol that resulted within the riot.
Mr. Perry, a former Army helicopter pilot who’s near Mr. Meadows and one other of the Republicans now under subpoena, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, coordinated lots of the efforts to maintain Mr. Trump in office. His colleagues referred to him as General Perry; he retired from the Pennsylvania National Guard in 2019.
Representative Mo Brooks
Members of the committee have expressed interest in testimony from Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama after he broke with Mr. Trump and accused the previous president of pressing him to seek out a option to remove President Biden from power.
While Mr. Brooks was initially amongst Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies in questioning the election consequence, their relationship soured after the previous president withdrew his endorsement of Mr. Brooks within the Republican primary for Alabama’s Senate seat in March.
Before then, Mr. Brooks had campaigned on false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. He had been one in all the speakers alongside Mr. Trump on the rally in Washington that preceded the riot.
But after the previous president withdrew his endorsement, Mr. Brooks got here forward with startling claims that Mr. Trump had repeatedly called on him to seek out a option to invalidate the election and one way or the other remove Mr. Biden. If the assertions are true, they might show that Mr. Trump continued his efforts to overturn the consequence long after leaving office. Mr. Trump has not denied making the statements.
“President Trump asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back within the White House, and hold a latest special election for the presidency,” Mr. Brooks said in a statement in March.
His account of the conversations was the primary time a lawmaker near Mr. Trump had suggested that the previous president had encouraged steps that, if taken, would have violated federal law.
Representative Andy Biggs
In a letter to Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona in May, the committee’s leaders described evidence linking the congressman to a spread of organizational efforts including “planning meetings” geared toward attracting protesters to Washington on Jan. 6.
The letter also described a scheme by several House Republicans to hunt presidential pardons for “activities taken in reference to President Trump’s efforts to overturn the outcomes of the 2020 presidential election.”
“Your name was identified as a possible participant in that effort,” it said.
It’s unclear whether Mr. Biggs or other House Republicans formally approached Mr. Trump about what would amount to a pre-emptive pardon, or what crime those pardons would have been for. Mr. Biggs declined this week to reply questions on the potential pardons.
A former leader of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, Mr. Biggs also tried to steer state legislators to hitch Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the election.
Representative Jim Jordan
As one in all Mr. Trump’s fiercest defenders in Congress, Mr. Jordan stood by him through several ordeals during his presidency, including operating as his chief defender during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment proceeding.
Within the weeks after the election, Mr. Jordan met usually with White House advisers to coordinate messaging in regards to the consequence, often following up with false claims of fraud during media appearances.
Members and investigators on the House panel have pushed aggressively for details surrounding conversations between Mr. Jordan and Mr. Trump on the day of the riot, after call records indicated that the 2 spoke over the phone that morning.
Mr. Jordan was deeply involved in Mr. Trump’s effort to fight the election results, including participating in planning meetings in November 2020 at Trump campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., and a gathering on the White House in December 2020.
On Jan. 5, 2021, Mr. Jordan forwarded to Mr. Meadows a text message he had received from a lawyer and former Pentagon inspector general outlining a legal technique to overturn the election.
“On Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, should call out all of the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes in any respect — in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence,” the text read.
Mr. Jordan has acknowledged speaking with Mr. Trump on Jan. 6, though he has said that he cannot remember how persistently they spoke that day or when the calls occurred. Considered one of Mr. Jordan’s conversations with Mr. Trump that day, a 10-minute phone call, was included within the official White House call log.
