Former President Donald Trump was subpoenaed Friday for documents and his testimony by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol.
The chairman of the committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, issued the subpoena to Trump in a letter eight days after the panel's unanimous vote to do so, at the end of what was likely the committee's final hearing.
The committee demands that the former president submit documentary material by Nov. 4, which would be followed by "one or more days" of his deposition under oath "on or about" Nov. 14, according to the panel's letter.
Trump has not yet said whether he plans to comply with the subpoena. Should he choose to defy it, the committee would need to secure a majority vote by the full House of Representatives to send the Justice Department a referral for a misdemeanor charge of refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena. It would then be up to the Justice Department to decide whether to charge him.
The committee hopes to find out even more about what Trump was doing before and during the attack. At the last hearing, the panel noted that multiple witnesses invoked the Fifth Amendment when they were asked by the committee about any relevant conversations with Trump during the post-election period.
The timeline for the select committee is short. It only has until the end of the year to wrap up its work, complicating efforts to subpoena Trump. A new Congress will be seated in January, and the CBS News Battleground Tracker poll suggests that control of the House could switch from Democratic to Republican.
Trump joins the ranks of other former U.S. presidents who have been subpoenaed after leaving office, including John Quincy Adams and Harry S. Truman.
