Five takeaways from the return of the January 6 committee

Committee takes action to demand testimony from Trump while revealing more shocking evidence and footage

On Thursday, members of the House select committee investigating January 6 returned to the US Capitol and met for their first meeting in several weeks, taking both historic action as well as laying out more damning testimony.

The hearing ended with the members voting to subpoena Mr Trump himself, after declaring that their fact-finding abilities were limited without the testimony of the president under oath.

It’s an escalation of the panel’s pressure at a time when the former president is already besieged by a number of legal investigations.

Here are five key moments from today’s committee meeting:

Donald Trump is subpoenaed for testimony

The conclusion of Thursday’s meeting was capped off with a unanimous vote by members to subpoena the former president for testimony regarding his actions leading up to and during the attack on Congress. It comes after the committee centred the meeting around the words and actions of Mr Trump himself during the riot, a move by the panel’s lawmakers to concentrate responsibility for the attack on the former president.

It’s a move that will almost certainly be contested by the ex-president’s lawyers, and could result in nothing happening should those legal battles persist into the election of a GOP-controlled House taking office next January.

Lawmakers raise the possibility of a criminal referral

Members of the panel also directly raised the possibility on Thursday of submitting a criminal referral to the Department of Justice urging the agency to prosecute Mr Trump for the attack.

It was raised as a direct remark from chairman Bennie Thompson as well as an insistence from vice chair Liz Cheney that the DoJ cannot say it has done its job should it choose to only prosecute the “foot soldiers” of the attack on Congress.

“Our nation cannot only punish the foot soldiers who stormed our capitol. Those who planned to overturn the election and brought us to the point of violence must also be accountable,” she said, adding: “Our committee may ultimately decide to make a series of criminal referrals to the Department of Justice”, while noting that it was ultimately the DoJ’s role to make that decision.

Footage shows Pelosi and Schumer behind the scenes

New footage played by the panel on Thursday depicted the actions of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in an unknown secure location at the Capitol during the siege; the pair are shown in the footage to be personally coordinating the law enforcement response via calls to governors of Maryland, Virginia, and the mayor of Washington DC. They are also heard demanding that the Justice Department take action.

“I’m gonna call up the effing secretary of [defense],” declares Mr Schumer around 3pm.

At another point, Ms Pelosi informs him: I was just talking to [Virginia] Gov Northam, and what he said is they sent 200 state police and a unit of the National Guard.”

The footage contrasted sharply with testimony from countless insiders in the White House who portrayed their boss, Mr Trump, as gleefully watching the unfolding violence on Fox News and refusing assistance when contacted by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Trump admitted in private that he lost the election

Going beyond their previous work to paint a picture of a president isolated from his own advisers due to his false beliefs about a “stolen” election, the January 6 panel revealed new evidence on Thursday indicating that Mr Trump himself had privately accepted his defeat while he publicly would continue to insist that he be crowned president for a second term.

Two separate high-ranking White House aides, Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farah, testified that they either heard the president personally say or heard others say that Mr Trump had acknowledged his defeat while suggesting that he could remain in office through other means.

Ms Hutchinson’s testimony on that issue was played by the committee for the first time.

According to Ms Hutchinson, Mr Trump spoke to her boss, then-chief of staff Mark Meadows, in December of 2020 shortly after the Supreme Court declined to take up his challenge to the election results in several battleground states.

Mr Trump, she testified, “had said something to the effect of, ‘I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost.’”

That comment was paired with testimony from Alyssa Farah, a former member of Mr Trump’s White House communications team. Ms Farah testified that in one post-election meeting with Mr Trump in Oval Office, the president quipped out loud while watching coverage of Mr Biden: “Can you believe I effing lost to this guy?”

Secret Service feared danger to Mike Pence

One of the last new pieces of information shared by the committee at today’s hearing involved retrieved messages sent between Secret Service agents in the hours leading up to the Capitol.

Private communications between agents indicated that the agency knew of a serious, rising danged to then-Vice President Mike Pence which they openly said resulted from Mr Trump’s rhetoric about his own second-in-command.

Lawmakers explained that testimony and uncovered messages revealed that the agency was particularly worried about violent “chatter” regarding the vice president after they began to notice the emphasis that Donald Trump was putting on his role in tweets and other settings.