Trump loyalists can’t hide this truth (opinion)
The committee has issued subpoenas to several loyalists of the former President, and their deadlines for cooperating have arrived. Will they be able to block or delay Congressional oversight, the way Trump and his allies did for all four years of his presidency?
We don’t think so. With Trump out of office, we believe the committee will get the information it wants on the timetable it needs.
Under the committee’s first wave of four subpoenas, key Trump loyalists Dan Scavino, Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows and Kash Patel are due to produce documents on Thursday and their testimony is due no later than October 15.
Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, was a witness to, and deeply involved in, Trump’s machinations to attack the election results, including pushing the Department of Justice to investigate baseless conspiracy theories and fraud claims about the 2020 presidential election, according to documents obtained by CNN and reported on in June. A spokesperson for Meadows then said Trump’s former chief of staff would not be commenting on the matter.
Deputy Chief of Staff Scavino was a constant presence around Trump and a mouthpiece on social media on and around January 6, according to the select committee’s subpoena, citing Scavino’s Twitter account, as well as accounts detailed in the recent Bob Woodward-Robert Costa book, “Peril.”
Patel was Trump’s hand-picked man at the Pentagon and in constant communication with the White House that day, the select committee subpoena said, citing documents provided to the committee by the Department of Defense. Patel has acknowledged he’s received the committee’s subpoena and said he would “continue to tell the truth to the American people about the events of January 6th.”
And then there is Trump’s outside and longtime adviser, Bannon, who seemed to predict that violence might occur and told Trump to “kill this administration in the crib” before January 6, according to accounts in the Woodward-Costa book. CNN reported that Bannon, speaking on his “War Room” podcast last month, “confirmed that he had huddled with Trump to plot a way to fundamentally undermine the Biden presidency on January 6 and even sort of declare victory.”
It appears that the committee has been successful in its attempts to serve subpoenas to Bannon and Meadows.
The second wave of 11 subpoenas to people responsible for organizing the Women for America First rally on the Ellipse on January 6 will come due. Though not household names, the 11 are critically important for untangling the events of that day and Trump’s role in them.
Those subpoena includes the former Trump campaign aide Katrina Pierson, who, the subpoena says (based on news reports), helped organize the rally and met with Trump in the Oval Office just two days before the insurrection. The subpoena targets also include Caroline Wren, who received tens of thousands of dollars as a consultant for the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee’s joint fundraising…