Dick Durbin Urges Ex-Aides to Defy Trump’s Orders and Comply With Jan. 6 Subpoenas: ‘He Doesn’t Have the Power to Pardon You Anymore’
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) strongly encouraged former aides to Donald Trump to comply with the subpoenas issued by the House committee investigating Jan. 6, after the former president did the exact opposite.
The former aides — White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications Dan Scavino, Defense Department official Kash Patel, and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon — were all instructed by Trump to not comply with the committee’s subpoenas. The subpoenas for closed-door depositions and records were first issued in September, and the deadline to comply was set to Thursday.
Bloomberg reported that a letter from a Trump lawyer stated that the testimony and records the committee is seeking is protected by executive privilege.
“President Trump is prepared to defend these fundamental privileges in court,” the letter reads.
During a Thursday interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Durbin had a pointed message for the four aides: comply with the subpoenas.
“I don’t think Mr. Trump’s aides are ever going to ask me for advice, but I would suggest modestly follow the law instead of the ravings of this former president,” Durbin said. “He doesn’t have the power to pardon you anymore. And probably I hope never will again.”
“Be careful. Follow the law,” he continued. “Even if the president is begging you to stay away because of the evidence that you might present.”
Asked if the aides or Trump could be held in contempt, Durbin said he would not “jump ahead of the script” and left it open for the select committee to enforce.
Tapper then turned his attention to the Senate Judiciary Committee report about Trump’s efforts to get the Justice Department to overturn his election loss. The report states that Trump called acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen nine times to push election conspiracies and even threatened to replace him when he rejected the idea of overturning the election.
“Thank goodness the president relented at the last second,” Durbin told Tapper. “His own counsel, Pat Cipollone, basically said it was a murder-suicide pact that he was considering and that there was going to be resignations all across the country if he did anything this radical. But the president was prepared to do this up until the very last minute.”
Tapper then noted that Republicans on the committee published a rebuttal to the report, arguing that Trump ultimately followed the advice of his counsel and did not end up replacing Rosen, as he had threatened.
“If I could put that in simple terms, I believe what they’re saying, ‘Well, it wasn’t a coup, it was only an attempted coup,'” Durbin replied. “Well, that’s the basic evidence before us. It was an attempt by the President of the United States to persuade the attorney general to do something unprecedented in American history and without any support in the law. And he failed in that effort. But he sure as hell tried.”
Watch above, via CNN.
