With the January 6th select committee having now officially subpoenaed former President Donald Trump, (and using that shocking escalation as a sort of “October Surprise”), there are now a great deal of unanswered and looming questions about what comes next.
Trump has yet to officially respond to the subpoena, and there’s really no telling what sort of angle he and his legal team will take here. Defying the subpoena could prove to be an ugly avenue, particularly after Steve Bannon was just sentenced to 4 months in prison on his contempt of Congress charge.
But testifying opens up a whole new can of worms, and the committee knows it.
When asked if the committee would consider taking his testimony live, Rep. Liz Cheney on Sunday did not directly respond. She said the committee would not allow Trump’s testimony to turn into a “food fight” on TV — much as was seen, she said, in Trump’s broadcast appearances such as one of his 2020 presidential debates — and she warned that the committee will take action if he does not comply with the subpoena.
“We are going to proceed in terms of the questioning of the former president under oath,” Cheney, R-Wyo., said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “It may take multiple days, and it will be done with a level of rigor and discipline and seriousness that it deserves. We are not going to allow — he’s not going to turn this into a circus.”
Then came the threats…
“We have many, many alternatives that we will consider if the former president decides he is not going to comply with his legal obligation, a legal obligation every American citizen has to comply with a subpoena,” she said.
Privately, Trump is said to be amenable to the idea of taking the figurative stage in front of the committee, but neither he nor his legal team have made any indication of just how they’ll play this just yet.
