There are plenty of instances of former presidents testifying before congress, and in fact, even sitting presidents have done so, according to the US Senate.
But such an appearance hasn’t been made in a while. The last former president to answer questions on Capitol Hill was Gerald Ford, who appeared before a Senate subcommittee on the constitution in 1983. He was also the last president in office to testify, during a 1974 House subcommittee hearing about his decision to pardon former president Richard Nixon for various charges related to the Watergate scandal.
Up until January 6, historians viewed Watergate as perhaps the worst political scandal in American history. But the insurrection at the Capitol may well have eclipsed that – and Trump could follow in the footsteps of his predecessors and appear before lawmakers to discuss his role in it.
While sitting and former presidents have testified before Congress in the past, Politico reports that subpoenaing a former commander in chief is far more contentious.
In 1953, former president Harry Truman defied a subpoena from the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee. “It is just as important to the independence of the Executive that the actions of the President should not be subjected to questioning by the Congress after he has completed his term of office as that his actions should not be questioned while he is serving as President,” he said in a lengthy speech explaining his refusal to attend.
The January 6 committee could, of course, go to court to force Trump to comply, assuming a judge – or more likely judges – agrees. But they simply don’t have the time. Their mandate expires at the end of the year, at the same time as this Congress terms out, and any court challenge would likely take months to resolve.
Not all Trump administration scandals involve the former president. Stephanie Kirchgaessner reports a Senate committee leaders wants answers about a real estate property deal involving Jared Kushner, a top aide to the former president:
A financial firm that operates billions of dollars in real estate properties around the world is facing new questions from the powerful chairman of the Senate finance committee about whether Qatar was secretly involved in the $1.2bn (£1bn) rescue of a Fifth Avenue property owned by Jared Kushner’s family while Kushner was serving in the White House.
Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who leads the finance committee, has given the chief executive of Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management until 24 October to answer a series of detailed questions about a 2018 deal in which Brookfield paid Kushner Companies for a 99-year lease on the family’s marquee 666 Fifth Avenue property.
When the deal was announced in August 2018, it was seen as the end of a drawn-out saga surrounding the property. The rescue, it was said in media reports, generated enough money for the Kushner family to pay $1.1bn (£970m) of debt on the building and buy out a partner.
In a statement on Thursday, Wyden accused Brookfield of stonewalling his committee and refusing to answer questions about the transaction, including whether Brookfield “intentionally misled” the public when it said that “no Qatar-linked entity” had been involved in the deal. In fact, it has since been alleged by Wyden that Brookfield used a Qatari-backed fund – called Brookfield Property Partners – to fund the transaction. At the time of the deal, Wyden said, the Qatari Investment Authority was the fund’s second largest investor.
One of the most gripping moments of the January 6 committee’s hearing yesterday came when the panel aired footage of congressional leaders scrambling for help after the Capitol was overrun. Here’s what the video showed:
New footage of the January 6 riots at the US Capitol shows House speaker Nancy Pelosi calmly trying to take charge of the situation as she sheltered at Fort McNair, two miles south of the Capitol.
“There has to be some way,” she told colleagues, “we can maintain the sense that people have that there is some security or some confidence that government can function and that you can elect the president of the United States.”
Then an unidentified voice interjected with alarming news: lawmakers on the House floor had begun putting on teargas masks in preparation for a breach. Pelosi asked the woman to repeat what she said.
While Trump twice escaped conviction by Congress, The Guardian’s Sam Levine finds the evidence laid out by the January 6 committee could form the backbone of a criminal case against the former president:
After more than a year of work that consisted of interviewing 1,000-plus witnesses and reviewing hundreds of thousands of documents, the committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol chose a simple message for its final public hearing: Donald Trump was singularly responsible for the attack.
Since its first hearing in June, the committee’s work has been aimed at two audiences. One of those has been the broad American public. Tactfully using video, the committee has told a disciplined, clear story of what happened on January 6, and the days leading up to it, filled with jaw-dropping soundbites from Trump’s closest aides.
But the committee’s public coda on Thursday appeared more directed at its second audience: an audience of one, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland.
Garland will ultimately decide whether to bring criminal charges against Trump over January 6, and the committee’s work, which has run parallel to the justice department’s investigation, has made a public case for bringing charges, attempting to bring along public support for doing so.
A new books argues that the way Democrats handled Trump’s first impeachment in 2019 laid the groundwork for the lawless streak he exhibited when he tried to overturn the following year’s elections, Politico reports.
In “Unchecked,” written by Politico reporter Rachael Bade and Washington Post reporter Karoun Demirjian, House speaker Nancy Pelosi is shown as being caught between two wings of the Democratic party as it weighs how to respond to Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden. One group, composed mostly of progressives, wanted a sprawling inquiry into all of the then-president’s alleged misdeeds, while another, made up of Democrats in vulnerable seats, wanted a narrowly tailored investigation into the Ukraine affair that wouldn’t take too long.
The latter group won out, but according to the book, Pelosi missed opportunities to wrangle some Republicans into supporting Trump’s impeachment – though the book concedes the effort may well have been a long shot, even if she tried.
The Senate ultimately acquitted Trump, and the book finds that decision emboldened Trump to attempt further schemes – like his plot to overturn the 2020 election. Here’s how Politico puts it:
.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}In the end, one political truism superseded all the others: What happens in January of an election year will be ancient history by the time voters cast ballots. This was especially true in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic seemed to emerge just as Democrats were licking their wounds from the impeachment trial acquittal.
Soon after, Trump would begin sowing the seeds of what would become his effort to overturn defeat in the presidential election, and by November, impeachment seemed an asterisk in a year that had become chaotic for many other reasons.
Ultimately, Democrats took the White House, even though Pelosi’s House majority shrank slightly after 2020. House managers of Trump’s first impeachment have insisted to this day that their existential warnings played a role in voters deeming him unfit for a second term.
His actions to subvert his 2020 loss, they argue, were evidence that Republicans’ decision to acquit him had left him feeling unchecked.
Trump hasn’t yet publicly said if he’d testify before the January 6 committee, as their subpoena compels him to.
But his political action committee has today distributed to reporters this letter, dated yesterday and addressed to the committee’s chair. The 14-page epistle is mostly a rehash of his baseless theories that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and a defense of his conduct on January 6. It opens with this line: “THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN!”
It’s unclear if Trump himself wrote it, but based on the prose, it’s difficult not to imagine his voice when reading it. Consider the second sentence:
.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The same group of Radical Left Democrats who utilized their Majority position in Congress to create the fiction of Russia, Russia, Russia, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, the $48 Million Mueller Report (which ended in No Collusion!), Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, the atrocious and illegal Spying on my Campaign, and so much more, are the people who created this Committee of highly partisan political Hacks and Thugs whose sole function is to destroy the lives of many hard-working American Patriots, whose records in life have been unblemished until this point of attempted ruination.
There are plenty of instances of former presidents testifying before congress, and in fact, even sitting presidents have done so, according to the US Senate.
But such an appearance hasn’t been made in a while. The last former president to answer questions on Capitol Hill was Gerald Ford, who appeared before a Senate subcommittee on the constitution in 1983. He was also the last president in office to testify, during a 1974 House subcommittee hearing about his decision to pardon former president Richard Nixon for various charges related to the Watergate scandal.
Up until January 6, historians viewed Watergate as perhaps the worst political scandal in American history. But the insurrection at the Capitol may well have eclipsed that – and Trump could follow in the footsteps of his predecessors and appear before lawmakers to discuss his role in it.
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Yesterday’s big news was that the January 6 committee had issued a subpoena to Donald Trump, in an attempt to compel the testimony of a man they say was responsible above all others for the deadly insurrection at the Capitol. You’d be right not to get your hopes up that the former president would honor their summons – he’s stymied various attempts to compel his behavior or hold him accountable over the years with lengthy court challenges, and the congressional subpoena seems like it could meet the same fate. But media outlets including the New York Times and Fox News report that Trump actually would like to speak to lawmakers – assuming he can do so live. We may hear from him today on what course of action he’s decided to take.
Here’s a look at what else is happening today:
Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair of the January 6 committee, will talk about defending democracy at Notre Dame University at 2.30pm eastern time.
Washington’s fury towards Saudi Arabia will be the subject when Democratic representative Ro Khanna, an advocate of cracking down on Riyadh over its backing of the recent Opec+ oil production cut, speaks with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft at 12pm eastern time.
Joe Biden is continuing his trip out west with a speech in Orange county, California, about “lowering costs for American families” and a stop in Oregon. There, the president will campaign for the state’s Democratic candidate for governor, who appears to be struggling polls.
Source: Elections - theguardian.com
