Schiff: Pence subpoena for Jan. 6 testimony a possibility
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said on Sunday that it is a possibility that the select House panel investigating Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol will subpoena former Vice President Mike Pence to testify.
“We’re not excluding anyone or anything at this point,” Schiff, a member of the House panel, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“We’re not taking anything off the table in terms of witnesses who have not yet testified. We would still, I think, like to have several high-profile people come before our committee,” he added. “But, at the moment, I can’t disclose what private conversations may or may not be going on with respect to certain individuals. But there are still key people we have not interviewed that we would like to.”
The California Democrat’s remarks came after the Jan. 6 panel last week detailed the pressure campaign on Pence by former President Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Schiff on Sunday said panel members this week will “hear about how a similar pressure campaign directed against state and local elections officials put their lives in danger.”
“And, similarly, [Trump] was told this scheme is essentially something that his own lawyers could not justify, but yet he pressed on, uprooted people’s lives, put their lives and our democracy very much at risk,” he said.
“Your hearing will include evidence about Trump electors in battleground states who submitted fake Electoral College ballots even though Trump lost these states that we are talking about. We have already heard that … Trump campaign officials were involved in that. Do you have evidence that the former president himself was involved?” host Dana Bash asked.
“Yes, we’ll show evidence of the president’s involvement in this scheme,” Schiff replied. “We’ll also again show evidence of what his own lawyers came to think about this scheme. And we’ll show courageous state officials who stood up and said they wouldn’t go along with this plan to either call legislatures back into session or decertify the results for Joe Biden.”
He added that the system “held because a lot of state and local election officials upheld their oath to the Constitution.”
“Just to be clear, you said you have evidence that the then-president was involved putting a fake slate of electors out there. Do you have evidence that he directed it?” Bash asked.
“I don’t want to get ahead of our hearing,” Schiff said. “We’ll show during the hearing what the president’s role was in trying to get states to name alternate slates of electors, how that scheme depended initially on hopes that the legislators would reconvene and bless it. They didn’t, and they press forward with it anyway.”
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