Former President Donald Trump’s effort to subpoena information related to the House investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, US Capitol riot was blocked Monday by a federal judge, who ruled that the request seemed like nothing more than a “fishing expedition.”
Trump and his legal team had sought to subpoena Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the House Jan. 6 select committee, and other government officials over allegedly “missing materials” from the panel’s archives.
“The broad scope of the records that Defendant seeks, and his vague description of their potential relevance, resemble less ‘a good faith effort to obtain identified evidence’ than they do ‘a general ‘fishing expedition’ that attempts to use the [Rule 17(c) subpoena] as a discovery device,” Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote in her order denying the subpoena request.
In August, Thompson noted that the committee did not keep records of materials that were not used during the panel’s hearings or featured in its publications, leading Trump’s lawyers to question whether they have been “lost, destroyed, or altered.”
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