Among the revelations from the new book from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa is a striking story about Steve Bannon. According to the authors’ reporting, Bannon was in communications with Donald Trump in the runup to the Jan. 6 attack.
As Costa explained during an MSNBC interview this week, Bannon, the Trump campaign’s chairman in 2016, “[I]t’s time to kill the Biden presidency in the crib.” The former Trump campaign chairman soon after played the clip on his podcast, effectively confirming the story.
This led some observers, including Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, to publicly question whether Bannon could credibly be accused of participating in a criminal conspiracy.
At a minimum, the revelations served as a reminder that Bannon and others like him appear to have key insights into the events of Jan. 6 and would be in a position to shed light on the insurrectionist violence. It’s against this backdrop that NBC News had this report overnight:
The congressional committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol issued subpoenas Thursday to some of former President Donald Trump’s closest advisers. The committee subpoenaed and set a date for sworn depositions for former White House strategist Steve Bannon, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former social media director Dan Scavino and Kashyap Patel, who was chief of staff to Trump’s defense secretary.
The bipartisan House select committee published information about the subpoenas online last night. (The materials cited reporting from the Woodward/Costa book.) The members of the former president’s team have been given two weeks to comply with the panel’s request.
The subpoenas are evidence of an intensifying select committee investigation. Politico reported yesterday morning, for example, that the National Archives and Records Administration has started to produce materials for the congressional panel. The Biden White House is also reportedly preparing to cooperate with the probe.
Donald Trump and his team, who appear to have quite a bit to hide, have already objected to the release of relevant information. A fight in the courts now appears inevitable.
In the meantime, the former president’s freak-out is ongoing. The Republican issued a new written statement last night that rambled on for a few hundred words, while referring to the select committee as the “Unselect Committee.”
After complaining about Black Lives Matter activists, Trump offered another tacit defense of the Jan. 6 rioters, adding, “Hopefully the Unselect Committee will be calling witnesses on the Rigged Presidential Election of 2020, which is the primary reason that hundreds of thousands of people went to Washington, D.C. in the first place.”
The former president concluded that he wants the American public to “see the real facts,” even while vowing to hide the facts from the congressional panel and the public.
