Day 9 of the January 6 hearings has concluded with the committee members unanimously voting to subpoena former US President Donald Trump. This is not the first time that a former president has been subpoenaed by a congressional committee. However, Trump himself has not taken to the subpoena kindly and has lashed out against the committee on his social media platform, Truth Social.

When CNN spoke to a January 6 Committee member, Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, he said that the need to subpoena Donald Trump arose because a number of his aides had refused to testify to the committee regarding the former president’s comments and whereabouts, the specifics of which the committee have not yet been able to nail down, on the day of the attack by pleading the fifth.

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Raskin commented, “We actually were able to nail down every salient detail in pretty much every element of the offense, except for a number of things relating directly to what Donald Trump was doing and what he was saying. Obviously, we got some of that, but we didn’t get all of it. And so one way of addressing the 30 or so witnesses who took the Fifth when it came to Donald Trump’s own actions, is to call Donald Trump in himself”.

When commenting on whether this subpoena will merely be a symbolic gesture, Raskin said, “I want to believe that every American citizen who knows something about these events would come forward to testify and nobody knows more about them than Donald Trump”.

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Raskin has also confirmed that the committee has not yet made a decision of what it plans to do if Trump tries to block the subpoena. According to him, “we haven’t discussed that because you’re several hypothetical steps down the road from us. But I’ll say this, we certainly have litigated in the past, and I think we’ve got a pretty unbroken track record of winning our cases precisely because all we’re asking people to do is to come forward and testify. And the Supreme Court has been perfectly clear that Congress has the power to do that.”