(RoyalPatriot.com )- The House’s special committee investing the attacks on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, recently issued its most public and controversial subpoena yet — to former President Donald Trump.
After a long debate about whether to formally subpoena Trump for his testimony or not, the committee announced in recent weeks that it would do exactly that. And it sent the official subpoena to the former president last week.
How it all pans out from here will grab headlines from every major outlet around the country, if not the world.
On Sunday, the committee’s vice chair, Wisconsin Republican Representative Liz Cheney, answered one major question that has been on the minds of most people since the subpoena was announced. Speaking on the “Meet the Press” TV program, Cheney — an outspoken enemy of Trump who was defeated in her own re-election primary by a Trump-backed candidate — said the committee wouldn’t give Trump a platform on which he could speak freely.
In explaining her reasoning, Cheney said they didn’t want Trump to turn his official testimony into a “food fight,” with insults being hurled back and forth. She explained:
“The committee treats this matter with great seriousness. And we are going to proceed in terms of the questioning of the former president under oath.
“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 the former president … He’s not going to turn this into a circus. This isn’t going to be, you know, his first debate against Joe Biden and the circus and the food fight that that became. This is a far too serious set of issues.”
In other words, Cheney and the Democrat-led committee wants to be able to control the narrative of Trump’s testimony — at least with the American public. If they were to let Trump testify live on TV — which is what he has suggested is the only way he’d comply with the subpoena.
If they were to do that, Cheney and her colleagues are sure that Trump would take full advantage of what would essentially be an open platform to speak freely on any topic he wanted to — in real-time.
While the January 6 committee has had some of its witnesses give testimony during its live airings of hearings, those witnesses were all vetted thoroughly by the committee and were considered friendly to the committee. In essence, committee members weren’t concerned about what might come out of their mouths.
With others who were considered Trump allies at least at one point, the committee held video-recorded testimonies. That enabled them to control the narrative, and present the American public with highly-edited clips of their testimony — all of which spoke to what the committee wants the public to see.
It’s not a surprise, then, that Cheney says the committee is going to take the exact same approach with Trump — if he were to decide to comply with the subpoena.
