The Supreme Court's rejection of Donald Trump's attempts to have hundreds of documents blocked from being given to the House committee investigating the January 6 attack, as well as more of his inner circle facing subpoenas, are setting up potentially explosive televised hearings of the panel's findings, experts have said.
The January 6 select committee, which has been conducting its review for several months, has already stated it hopes to reveal its findings in televised hearings during primetime once the collection of evidence has been concluded.
In recent days, the investigation has been ramped up after the Supreme Court denied Trump's request to block the transfer of the documents from the National Archives to the committee while dismissing his executive privilege arguments.
The panel has also started targeting Trump's family by subpoenaing and obtaining the phone records associated with his son Eric Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, fiancée to Donald Trump Jr., as well as requesting the former president's daughter Ivanka Trump voluntarily speak to them about her father's actions on January 6.
The move to get information from Trump's family follows on from several members of his legal team, including his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, being subpoenaed by the committee for pushing unsubstantiated claims about the 2020 election and attempting to "disrupt or delay the certification" of its results.
Speaking to CNN, Norm Eisen, senior fellow of the Brookings Governance think tank, said the panel going "deeper" into Trump's inner circle will help them make a stronger case against Trump and "lead to dramatic televised hearings" and a report which "may very well have a criminal referral or referrals."
Eisen, who also served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment, said that "perhaps the most important information" that can be passed onto the January 6 committee is evidence that the former president knew his election fraud cries were not true after being told so by some of his closest allies.
"In Georgia, where he's under criminal investigation, he knew when he said to the Secretary of State 'just find 11,790 votes' that those votes didn't exist and he was calling for an alleged criminal election fraud," Eisen said. "So that kind of evidence is going to be powerful in the hearings and in the report that the committee will issue with possible criminal referrals."
Speaking to MSNBC, the former acting solicitor general of the U.S., Neal Katyal, said the Supreme Court decision means Trump cannot use his "signature move" of delay to try and stop potential damaging information from ever coming out.
Katyal added that not only would these documents—which include presidential diaries, logs of phone calls and "multiple binders" regarding the 2020 election—become public during any televised hearings, but so would the testimony of Trump's inner circle.
"He was going to invoke executive privilege for all that, that's now decimated by the Supreme Court's ruling," Katyal said.
"If you're a former president, to have your case not heard by the Supreme Court on an executive power issue, it's virtually unthinkable," he added. "It's almost automatic. The Supreme Court's going to hear your case and likely rule for you...it's possible to lose, but you really got to work at it. Here, Donald Trump worked at it.
"He made such bogus claims about executive privilege and led the Supreme Court to do what it did. And that's going to make it virtually impossible for Trump and his team of insurrectionists to try and block the testimony and documents from coming out in live televised hearings."
Elsewhere, Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot, said that the upcoming hearings regarding the investigation will "blow the roof off the House" and compared its potential findings to that of the Watergate scandal.
"We are going to do everything we can to subpoena all the information we need and to enforce our subpoenas," Raskin said in a video call broadcast on the BoldProgressives' Facebook page to an audience of more than 40,000, reported Yahoo News.
"But even if we don't get every last person in there, we are going to have hearings that I believe will be compared to the Watergate hearings, because they are going to blow the roof off the House in terms of explaining to America what actually happened in the attack on our democracy.
"I hope everybody will watch and I hope everybody will discuss it and then it will lead to a report that, I hope again, will be a game changer in terms of American history," Raskin added.
It is unclear when exactly any televised hearings would take place, although members of the committee have cited late March or early April for potential broadcasts.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House committee, previously told Bloomberg News: "The public needs to know, needs to hear from people under oath about what led up to January 6, and to some degree, what has continued after January 6."
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About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, domestic policy ... Read more
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