Pence could be subpoenaed by Jan. 6 committee, Schiff says
WASHINGTON – Former Vice President Mike Pence could be subpoenaed to testify to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Rep. Adam Schiff said on Sunday.
“We’re not taking anything off the table in terms of witnesses who have not yet testified,” Schiff, a California Democrat and member of the committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“There are still key people we have not interviewed that we would like to,” he added, saying Pence is “certainly a possibility.”
The panel heard from Pence’s top lawyer on Thursday, who said he voiced “vociferous disagreement” about former President Donald Trump’s pressure on Pence to try to block the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland who is also on the committee, praised Pence for his actions on Jan. 6.
“On that day he was a hero for resisting all of the pressure campaigns and the coercive efforts to get him to play along with this continuation of the ‘big lie,’ this big joke that he could somehow call off all of the proceedings himself,” Raskin said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The committee’s first public hearings have revealed chilling details of the attack, including testimony that organizers would have killed Pence if given the chance.
The panel rendered a portrait of Trump as callously indifferent to the danger his vice president faced throughout the day.
Schiff said on Sunday that upcoming hearings will unveil more evidence of Trump’s participation in the effort to overthrow the election results.
“I don’t want to get ahead of our hearing. We will show during a 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 legislatures would reconvene and bless it,” he said.
Raskin said that more people are now “turning over information to the committee.”
“There are people who are just realizing that they are in possession of facts or evidence that the committee might not have,” he said. “We know things this weekend that we didn’t know last weekend.”
The committee is set Tuesday to outline aggressive efforts by Trump and his allies to pressure state officials to help overturn the election.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, a Republican who defeated a Trump-backed candidate in the state’s primary earlier this year, and his top deputy, Gabriel Sterling, are to be the live witnesses. The televised hearing, the fourth of seven planned by the panel, is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. Eastern time.