Former US President Donald Trump has been officially summoned by the investigative committee into the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. If he faces the panel, he must testify under oath. However, a report by the Washington Post on Friday caused more excitement than this news, according to which the ex-president actually kept extremely confidential secret documents about China and Iran in his private estate.
At least one of the documents seized in August by the US Federal Police FBI in the luxury Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida is about the Iranian missile program, the Post reported, citing informed circles. Other documents describe "highly confidential intelligence work" about China, it said. Accordingly, the documents provide insights into intelligence methods that the United States wants to keep secret from the rest of the world. FBI investigators had seized around 11,000 documents in Mar-a-Lago on August 8, including more than a hundred classified documents, some classified as "top secret". Trump has denounced the searches of his private rooms as politically motivated.
Meanwhile, the parliamentary investigative committee into the storming of the US Capitol followed up on its announcement with action and officially summoned the former president. In a letter released Friday, the panel urged the Republican to testify under oath beginning around November 14. According to this, Trump should submit the requested documents by November 4th.
The nine-member House of Representatives committee of inquiry voted unanimously last week to subpoena Trump. Trump must be "accountable to the American people" for his actions, said committee chairman Bennie Thompson of the Democratic Party at the time. Trump, who is flirting with another presidential candidacy in 2024, has not yet stated whether he is ready to testify.
However, a statement is fundamentally highly unlikely - especially since the investigative committee is running out of time: President Joe Biden's Democrats are likely to lose their majority in the House of Representatives to Trump's Republicans in the November 8 congressional elections. These should quickly wind up the committee of inquiry at the start of the new parliamentary year in January.
Hundreds of radical Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when Biden's victory in the presidential election was to be finally confirmed there. In the weeks before, Trump had spread the false claim that he had actually won the election and that massive election fraud had robbed him of a second term. In a speech immediately before the Capitol was stormed, he called on his followers to fight "whatever the hell".
