WASHINGTON -- Members of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot said Sunday that they may subpoena former Vice President Mike Pence and are waiting to hear from Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, about her role in the illegal plot to overturn the 2020 election.
Lawmakers indicated that they will release more evidence about former President Donald Trump's fundraising off baseless claims of a stolen presidential election. They also pledged to provide pertinent material to the Justice Department by the end of the month for its criminal investigation. The department complained in a letter last week that the committee was complicating its investigation by not sharing transcripts from its 1,000 interviews.
Pence could be subpoenaed to testify to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, Rep. Adam Schiff said Sunday.
"We're not taking anything off the table in terms of witnesses who have not yet testified," Schiff, a California Democrat and member of the committee, said on CNN's "State of the Union."
"There are still key people we have not interviewed that we would like to," he added, saying Pence is "certainly a possibility."
The panel heard from Pence's top lawyer Thursday, who said he voiced "vociferous disagreement" about Trump's pressure on Pence to try to block the congressional certification of Joe Biden's presidential victory.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland who is also on the committee, praised Pence for his actions on Jan. 6.
"On that day he was a hero for resisting all of the pressure campaigns and the coercive efforts to get him to play along with this continuation of the 'big lie,' this big joke that he could somehow call off all of the proceedings himself," Raskin said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The committee's first public hearings have revealed chilling details of the attack, including testimony that organizers would have killed Pence if given the chance.
The panel rendered a portrait of Trump as callously indifferent to the danger his vice president faced throughout the day.
Schiff said Sunday that upcoming hearings will unveil more evidence of Trump's participation in the effort to overthrow the election results.
"I don't want to get ahead of our hearing. We will show during a hearing what the president's role was in trying to get states to name alternate slates of electors, how that scheme depended initially on hopes that the legislatures would reconvene and bless it," he said.
Raskin said that more people are now "turning over information to the committee."
"There are people who are just realizing that they are in possession of facts or evidence that the committee might not have," he said. "We know things this weekend that we didn't know last weekend."
The committee is set Tuesday to outline aggressive efforts by Trump and his allies to pressure state officials to help overturn the election.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, a Republican who defeated a Trump-backed candidate in the state's primary earlier this year, and his top deputy, Gabriel Sterling, are to be the live witnesses. The televised hearing, the fourth of seven planned by the panel, is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. Eastern time.
ALARMING MESSAGE
One of two Republican members of the House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, starkly warned Sunday that his own party's lies could feed additional violence.
"There is violence in the future, I'm going to tell you," said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., on ABC's "This Week." "And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can't expect any differently."
Kinzinger, who defied party leadership by serving on the Democratic-led committee, described an alarming message he received at home in the mail several days ago threatening to execute him, his wife and their 5-month-old baby.
"I'd never seen or had anything like that. It was sent from the local area," he said.
Public officials have been inundated with threats in recent months, many spurred by former Trump's continued obsession with the baseless claim that his 2020 loss was the result of a vast conspiracy of fraud.
The Washington Post last year tracked how election administrators in at least 17 states received threats of violence in the months after the Jan. 6 attack, often sparked directly by comments from Trump.
The violence on Jan. 6 was a logical conclusion given the falsehoods spread by Trump and his allies, Kinzinger said.
"If you truly believe the deep state owned the election and the democracy was stolen and the election was stolen, that's the most logical outcome," said Kinzinger, who voted to impeach Trump shortly after the Jan. 6 attack and is not running for re-election.
He warned that the lies have not ended and could lead to a degradation of the democratic system, pointing to a county in New Mexico where Republican commissioners last week refused to certify the results of a primary election because they did not trust their voting machines.
The commission reversed its rejection only after an order from the state supreme court.
LETTER TO GINNI THOMAS
Schiff said the committee also wants to interview Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Emails and texts show that Ginni Thomas was actively working to upend Biden's win, even though it was clear the Supreme Court could play a key role in the outcome. (The court ultimately declined to hear a case to overturn Biden's win in four states.)
"We have a range of questions to ask her," Schiff said. "Obviously, I think the committee will be interested, among other things, whether this was discussed with Justice Thomas, given that he was ruling on cases impacting whether we would get some of this information."
The committee last week sent Ginni Thomas a letter asking her to testify. She suggested to the conservative publication The Daily Caller last week that she is willing to testify voluntarily.
"I can't wait to clear up misconceptions. I look forward to talking to them," she said.
Republican state Rep. Rusty Bowers, the Arizona House speaker, is scheduled to testify at the committee's hearing Tuesday focusing on state officials who were contacted by Trump and the White House as Trump tried to overturn the results. Bowers is likely to be asked about emails he received from Thomas urging him and other state officials to set aside Biden's 2020 win and choose their own set of electors.
Along with emailing Arizona officials, Thomas, who attended a rally Trump held just before the Capitol riot, also had written to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the weeks after the election encouraging him to work to overturn Biden's victory.
Emails recently obtained by the committee also show Thomas had email communications with John Eastman, the lawyer who played a key role on behalf of Trump in his efforts to pressure Pence to overturn the election.
"I think the committee will be interested in, among other things, whether this was discussed with Justice Thomas, given that he was ruling on cases impacting whether we would get some of this information," Schiff said.
Kinzinger said that, in the end, the public will have a clear picture of a "failure of the oath" by Trump.
"I think what we're presenting before the American people certainly would rise to a level of criminal involvement by a president," he said.
Information for this article was contributed by reporters Hope Yen of The Associated Press, Victoria Cavaliere of Bloomberg News (TNS) and Rosalind S. Helderman of The Washington Post.