WASHINGTON — The House Jan. 6 committee on Thursday subpoenaed Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of former President Donald Trump’s eldest son who was in the Oval Office at the time Trump held his final conversation with his vice president trying to make Mike Pence overturn the election for him.
Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson said Guilfoyle’s presence in the White House the morning of the attack on the Capitol, her appearance at Trump’s rally that day and her involvement in raising money for it all made her an important witness.
“Because Ms. Guilfoyle backed out of her original commitment to provide a voluntary interview, we are issuing today’s subpoena that will compel her to testify,” Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, said in a statement. “We expect her to comply with the law and cooperate.”
Guilfoyle, who is engaged to Donald Trump Jr., did not respond to a HuffPost request for comment.
The subpoena itself said Guilfoyle, in addition to have having boasted about having “raised so much money for this,” was also involved in the president’s decisions about who would and would not be allowed to speak onstage, “including concerns raised about him sharing the stage with people like Ali Alexander, Alex Jones, and Roger Stone.”
Alexander, Jones and Stone were all involved in the “Stop the Steal” movement that spread Donald Trump’s lies that the election had been stolen from him, and were pushing for a protest at the Capitol itself. Much of the rally audience did march on the Capitol — as Trump had urged them to do — and several thousand then illegally breached police barricades and entered the building.
The subpoena also mentions Guilfoyle’s words at the rally and references a now-infamous video recording of her dancing to the pre-rally soundtrack: “You told the crowd, ‘We will not allow the liberals and the Democrats to steal our dream or steal our elections,’ and were filmed backstage prior to your speech telling people to ‘Have the courage to do the right thing. Fight!’”
The committee has subpoenaed dozens of witnesses and spoken with hundreds more on a voluntary basis, including several senior aides to Pence. On Wednesday night, the committee filed a lengthy brief in federal court in California in a lawsuit filed by a pro-Trump lawyer who wrote a memo arguing that Pence had the unilateral ability to declare Trump the winner, but who is now trying to block the release of his emails on that topic. In the 221-page document, the committee tells the judge that the lawyer, John Eastman, cannot cite attorney-client privilege because of the “crime-fraud” exception to that rule.
“The Select Committee ... has a good-faith basis for concluding that the president and members of his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the committee’s lawyers wrote.
Trump, despite losing the election by 7 million votes nationally and 306-232 in the Electoral College, became the first president in more than two centuries of elections to refuse to hand over power peacefully. His incitement of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — his last-ditch attempt to remain in office ― led to five deaths, including a police officer’s, injured another 140 officers and led to four police suicides.
Despite this, Trump remains the dominant figure in the Republican Party and is openly speaking about running for the presidency again in 2024.