Donald Trump’s response to a subpoena by the House select committee investigating the events of the January 6 Capitol riot has been met with derision and confusion, following its publication on Friday morning.
The former president released a four-page letter to the members of the committee — with a 10-page appendix attached — in which he regurgitated a range of disproven claims about fraud in the 2020 election.
Mr Trump also completely failed to mention the panel’s unanimous vote to subpoena him to testify under oath on his central role in the attack on the US Capitol in the final days of his presidency, as laid out over nine public hearings.
Instead, the former president began in his familiar style, writing in all caps that he still believes the 2020 election was “rigged and stolen”.
CBS News congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane noted that over the course of the next 14 pages he does not commit to an interview or to the sharing of documents, but rather reiterates all of his previous baseless claims of election fraud mentioning “Antifa”, “Hacks and Thugs”, “Hoax”, and “Fake News”.
Republican Trump critic Amanda Carpenter describes the letter as “unhinged” for “sticking to his lies”, but notes that this was “as expected”.
“I don’t say this lightly, but I don’t know how else to read this letter as anything other than the rantings of a madman,” she tweeted. “Just try to imagine Trump saying this in the context of a congressional hearing under oath. No adoring crowds. A sterile room with stone face questioners. He would look absolutely mental.”
Kyle Cheney, senior legal affairs reporter for Politico, called the letter “bizarre” and “nonsensical” for its non-response to the committee and for the way he “regurgitates debunked election fraud claims”.
Kathryn Watson, White House correspondent for CBS News, noted another Trump classic that has been an obsession since his first day in office — he took time to boast about the size of the crowd that showed up for his Ellipse speech on the morning of 6 January.
Dedicating a whole paragraph to this well-worn gripe, the former president claims that pictures accurately showing crowd size “were perhaps cancelled, scrubbed, deleted or, in any event, not available”.
The first appendix consists of four such photos.
NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny, who called the letter a “rambling hodgepodge of election misinfo”, also picked up on this, calling it her favourite part.
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale observes that Mr Trump showcases the usual election lies at length in the letter, covering the full range of “eternal general ones” such as the election being stolen, but digs deeper into very specific allegations such as Pennsylvania having more votes than voters.
Mr Dale notes that these “were debunked like 22 months ago”.
Weijia Jiang, CBS News’ senior White House correspondent, observed the former president’s inclusion of another specific disproven conspiracy theory that “somehow Biden beat Obama with the Black population in select swing state cities, but nowhere else”, a point also picked up on by her radio colleague Steve Portnoy.
With no real response to the January 6 committee’s subpoena anywhere within the 14 pages, anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project perhaps summed up Mr Trump’s continued complaining and protestations best.
The group tweeted a gif of a crying baby and the abbreviation “TL;DR” — too long; didn’t read.
