A former House Republican who once led multiple investigations into Bill and Hillary Clinton’s scandals is urging prosecutors to subpoena the records of former President Donald Trump’s top officials and family members to determine if they had any involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Former Rep. Barbara Comstock told a Zoom meeting today that Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and former chief of staff Mark Meadows should be on the list of those in the spotlight.
“You’re going to have lots of people who are going to keep their communications with Trump Jr. or with Ivanka,” she told a New York University-sponsored discussion on the GOP after Trump.
“If you go subpoena those people individually, say subpoena Mark Meadows for all the contact that he had with anybody having anything to do with this rally on Jan. 6, how did that come about, all those documents will be very easy to get, and you should subpoena those individuals personally because they will not have executive privilege over any documents they took home and are sitting in their basement or their garage,” Comstock said.
She provided no information suggesting that the Trump family members had any involvement in the Capitol protests.
But Comstock said the new congressional investigation of the riot should look at White House involvement, not just the background of the protesters or the events at the Capitol.
Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol – An important analysis that shows the need for a thorough investigation for history and to show the damage and danger of Trump’s Big Lie. https://t.co/FDZJyf75Ck
— Barbara Comstock (@BarbaraComstock) July 1, 2021
“There’s so many things that haven’t been looked at at all — basically the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House. Nothing has been looked out from Jan. 6 about what they did that day, how that rally came about, all of the people who funded the rally, how people like the Proud Boys and these, you know, Three Percenters, these different groups, the white nationalist groups, that were there,” she added.
Comstock, who represented northern Virginia for two terms, was joined by other lawmakers who held a similar anti-Trump view and argued that Republicans should drop their allegiance to the former president and open up to bipartisanship with Democrats.
She and the others said that Trump and his team have been trying to use their leverage and popularity to continue to question the 2020 election results and muddy the New York prosecution of his company.
Comstock called the Trump team “grifters” for seeking to fundraise off the 2020 election claims.
And she called those who believe the claims “suckers” eagerly hoping Trump will run for a second term.
“They want to keep the grift going. They want to keep making money off of this whole big lie,” she said. “These people are all making money off of suckers who are out there sending in their $25 and $50 donations every month because they’ve been convinced the election was stolen. So that’s why I say to my Republican colleagues, you have people who are continuing to be victims of Donald Trump and his, you know, group of grifters, and you owe it to your constituents to stand up and tell the truth and tell these people [to] stop sending your $25 and $50 for somebody who is just using it to, you know, continue this big lie that has nothing to do with him ever being back in office. Because he won’t — I don’t think he’ll run.”
Comstock was defeated in the 2018 midterm elections in which Republicans were targeted for any link to Trump. She had broken with him on issues, but her district had already trended pro-Democrat.
Before her election, she was a Justice Department official in the Bush administration and investigated the Clintons as a GOP House staffer.
She said those investigations were made easier because former staffers took key information home that was easily subpoenaed.
“I don’t understand why they haven’t subpoenaed things already because there’s existing committees that could have subpoenaed things. And I did investigations in the 90s of the Clinton administration, and one of the things that we did that proved to be very effective is that people who had already left the White House — we knew that the chances were they’d take documents with them,” she said. “I think that is going to be very likely in the case of the Trump people because they’re all afraid of each other. They’re all afraid that they’re going to be the scapegoat, but they’re going to be blamed for things.”
