These are the people the select committee may call to testify about the Jan. 6 Capitol attack
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Two weeks after its first public hearing, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack has yet to announce who else it plans to call to testify, though members have made clear that anyone with relevant information about the insurrection, including former White House officials, Republicans in Congress and even former President Donald Trump himself, could be subject to a subpoena.
“If we get an inkling that there’s any resistance with providing the committee some of this information, boom, here comes the subpoena,” the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a recent interview with the Washington Post.
While records subpoenaed by the committee, such as White House telephone and visitor logs from Jan. 6 and the days prior, could yield potentially illuminating evidence, attempts to compel testimony from Trump and members of his inner circle are expected to be stalled by legal challenges. That means investigators are also likely looking for key witnesses — like the four police officers who spoke at the first hearing — willing to testify voluntarily. This could include anyone from organizers of the rally where Trump addressed supporters before they stormed the Capitol to government whistleblowers.
Below are some current and former officials who, based on news reports and previous public statements, including testimony for other congressional inquiries, not only appear to be in a position to provide valuable information to the committee, but may be willing to do so without a subpoena:
Jeffrey Rosen, former acting attorney general
In the lead-up to Jan. 6, Trump reportedly pressured Rosen to investigate claims of widespread election fraud, which the Justice Department had already concluded there was no evidence to substantiate, and threatened to fire Rosen when he refused to oblige. Rosen was tight-lipped when asked by other congressional committees about the details of his conversations with the then president during this period. But that was before the Justice Department told former officials last month that they could provide “unrestricted testimony” to committees investigating the Jan. 6 attack and Trump’s efforts to undercut the results of the 2020 election.
Rosen reportedly met with the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general last week, and over the weekend he spoke to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for more than six hours behind closed doors, providing what Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., described as “dramatic evidence of how intent Trump was in overthrowing the election.”
It’s not clear whether the select committee has formally requested testimony from Rosen, but in addition to his account of Trump’s efforts to subvert Biden’s electoral victory, House investigators will also likely want to know more about the Justice Department’s role in preparing for and responding to the events of Jan. 6.
According to a bipartisan Senate report published in June, several Pentagon officials, including former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, testified that it was their understanding that the Justice Department had been designated as the lead federal agency in charge of securing Congress when it met to certify the electoral votes on Jan. 6, as it had been during protests following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. But Defense officials said the Justice Department failed to establish a security plan ahead of the Jan. 6 joint session, nor did it take action to coordinate the federal response while the Capitol was under attack.
In May, however, Rosen told members of the House Oversight Committee that the Pentagon’s understanding of the Justice Department’s responsibilities with regard to Jan. 6 security planning was “not accurate.” The Senate report also noted that, by the time of its publication, the Justice Department “has not acknowledged that it was designated the lead federal agency for January 6 and has yet to fully comply with the Committees’ requests for information.”
This seems like a fairly significant discrepancy, given everything else known about the inadequate preparation for and delayed response to the violence that ultimately unfolded that day. If called to testify before the select committee, Rosen could help clarify what the Justice Department’s role was ahead of Jan. 6. The committee could also subpoena documents from the Justice Department, such as communication records relating to security plans for Jan. 6 or the response to the Capitol attack.
Maj. Gen. William Walker, former commander, D.C. National Guard
Walker is now the House sergeant-at-arms, brought in to bring the Capitol complex's security up to speed in the new post-Jan. 6 reality. But on the day of the insurrection, he was in charge of the D.C. National Guard. He commanded a 40-person quick reaction force and another 300 guardsmen who were already activated that day.
Walker has testified that his ability to deploy National Guard soldiers to the Capitol was greatly hindered by limitations placed on him by Miller, the acting Pentagon chief, who had issued instructions on Jan. 4 that the National Guard could not take any significant actions without his approval.
It may be useful to hear from Walker again to see if there is more to this story about why National Guard units did not arrive at the Capitol until around 5:30 p.m., even after Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund had placed what Walker described as a “frantic” phone call to him at 1:49 p.m., pleading for troops to come as soon as possible. Trump supporters had already been battling police for roughly an hour by that point, after breaking through the first security barriers just before 1 p.m.
“Chief Sund, his voice cracking with emotion, indicated that there was a dire emergency on Capitol Hill and requested the immediate assistance of as many guardsmen as I could muster,” Walker testified at a Senate hearing in March. He said he immediately relayed this request to “Army senior leadership” but that he did not hear back from them for three hours, until just after 5 p.m.
Christopher Miller, former defense secretary, and Ryan McCarthy, former secretary of the Army
It’s certain that the House select committee will want to hear more from both Miller and McCarthy on why it took so long to activate the D.C. National Guard once rioters had stormed the Capitol, and how much of the military’s planning for and response to the violence of Jan. 6 was influenced by concerns about optics.
Miller, who was appointed acting defense secretary after the 2020 presidential election, has said that some of the restrictions he put on the D.C. National Guard ahead of Jan. 6 were shaped in part by the lessons learned from the military’s apparent overreach during the largely peaceful protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd the previous spring.
Though Miller was not in charge of the military in the spring of 2020, he told senators earlier this year that the backlash over the federal response to George Floyd protests in D.C. “reiterated things that we already know, which is the United States Armed Forces should only be used as a last resort in domestic law enforcement after all other capabilities have been expended.”
McCarthy, the Army’s civilian chief at the time of the Capitol riot, also acknowledged that the widely criticized use of National Guard troops during the 2020 protests loomed large over the Pentagon’s leadership as it planned for pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6.
“If we were going to put troops on American streets ... we wanted to be very clear about what we were doing,” he said in Senate testimony.
Miller has also said that he and McCarthy did not want to add to fears that the military would be used by Trump to take control of the election certification.
“No such thing was going to occur on my watch, but these concerns, and hysteria about them, nonetheless factored into my decisions regarding the appropriate and limited use of our armed forces to support civilian law enforcement during the Electoral College certification,” Miller told members of the House Oversight Committee in May.
Miller has previously insisted that Trump did not attempt to delay the military response to the Capitol attack, but the committee will be able to use its subpoena power to obtain documents that could shed more light on this question.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
According to the Senate report from June, during a Jan. 4 conference call with members of the Cabinet, Milley and Defense Secretary Miller both raised concerns about the permits allowing 1,000 to 2,000 people to gather outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 and even suggested locking down D.C. to prevent possible violence.
It wasn’t just Trump’s supporters who had reportedly worried Milley. According to a book published last month by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Milley was so concerned that Trump might attempt a coup after losing the election in November that he and other top military brass planned to resign if ordered to take any illegal or dangerous actions to keep Trump in office.
Though Milley has publicly defended the Pentagon’s response to the attack on the Capitol, it seems reasonable that the select committee will want to know more about what, specifically, was the basis for his concerns about Trump and his supporters and why, in light of these concerns, more security measures weren’t put in place ahead of Jan. 6. Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who serves on the select committee, has said it’s “certainly possible” that the panel will seek testimony from Milley.
Former Vice President Mike Pence
It’s not clear what Pence might know about Trump’s actions leading up to that day. On Jan. 6, Pence was inside the Capitol and was evacuated from the Senate chamber, where he was presiding over the certification of the election results. Minutes later, Trump tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
Trump had repeatedly urged Pence in the days and hours leading up to the insurrection not to certify the election. Pence has not said much about his communications from a secure bunker inside the Capitol after he was evacuated. The committee will want to know who he spoke to, what role he played in approving reinforcements for the Capitol to beat back rioters, and whether he encountered resistance from Trump’s orbit. The question is whether Pence will agree to testify, or whether he holds out hope of running for president in 2024 and thinks that cooperating will doom his chances.
Cover thumbnail photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
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