Jan. 6 Committee Reportedly Weighing Whether to Request Trump, Pence to Appear
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Getty (2) Donald Trump and Mike Pence
The U.S. House committee investigating the Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021 is meeting Tuesday to discuss, among other things, whether or not they will formally invite either former President Donald Trump or former Vice President Mike Pence to appear before them.
Sources tell CNN that, while the committee doesn't expect that either man would agree to testify, they are eager to get the requests on the historic record.
So far, the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection has held eight public hearings, which began on June 9 and have all featured new revelations about the events leading up to the attacks.
The committee has heard testimony from Justice Department officials who detailed Trump's unrelenting pressure to find evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, Capitol Police officers who fought off Trump supporters and some former White House staffers, who have detailed the former president's alleged behavior in the hours leading up to the riots.
Among the most striking revelations came via a former aide to Mark Meadows (another of Trump's chiefs of staff), who testified that Trump was aware his supporters were armed in D.C. on Jan. 6, and that he lunged at his Secret Service detail in the car in an attempt to reach the Capitol that day.
The committee is expected to start up its public hearings this month, with a final report expected sometime in December.
The relationship between Trump and his former vice president has reportedly been fractured since the two left office in the wake of the riots — first escalating when Pence refused to overturn the results of the election won by Joe Biden in 2020.
In a statement published hours before the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Pence explained he had no authority to try and overturn the votes — a move that angered Trump, who took to Twitter to say Pence "didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution."
As Pence's statement was released, the vice president and congressional lawmakers began to gather to count Electoral College votes.
Trump's supporters eventually overpowered Capitol officers that day, forcing their way into the building in a scene that eventually led to the deaths of four people as well as the evacuation of Congress and the vice president himself, who was whisked to an undisclosed location.
Footage showed that some of Trump's supporters were chanting "hang Mike Pence" as they roamed the Capitol (a chant that Trump himself allegedly endorsed while watching the footage on television).
A U.S. Secret Service inspector revealed for the first time during a court testimony in March that Pence sheltered for several hours in a loading dock amid the riots. Meanwhile, an anonymous security official told the Jan. 6 committee in a July interview that members of Pence's security detail were so worried for their safety that they made goodbye calls to their families that day.
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"There were a lot of — there was a lot of yelling, a lot of very personal calls over the radio, so it was disturbing," the anonymous official said. "I don't like talking about it, but there were calls to say goodbye to family members, so on and so forth."
In a January interview with Fox News, Pence said he hadn't spoken to Trump since "last summer," but that the two "parted amicably."
