D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has denied former President Donald Trump’s motion to subpoena records from the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 committee, arguing that his requests are like a fishing expedition.
Her seven-page decision criticized the scope and alleged vagueness of President Trump’s requests. It also argued that he was improperly applying Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 17 to information that could be obtained through other means.
“Defendant has not met his burdens with respect to his proposed Rule 17(c) subpoenas,” Judge Chutkan said.
“He has not sufficiently justified his requests for either the ‘Missing Materials’ themselves or the other five categories of documents related to them.”
Quoting the United States v. Cuthbertson, she added that 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.'”
President Trump’s initial motion from Oct. 11 requested purportedly “missing materials” that the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 had allegedly failed to preserve and transfer to another congressional committee.
Fox News reported in August that Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight for the Committee on House Administration, accused the select committee of failing to provide certain communications with the Biden administration, as well as video recordings of depositions and interviews leveraged by the select committee.
“President Trump is fully entitled to seek the missing records by subpoena,” the defense wrote in its October motion.
“It is also equally important to determine if these records have been lost, destroyed, or altered.
“The requested subpoenas are narrowly tailored to achieve these legitimate ends, which are fundamental to ensuring President Trump’s right to a fair trial under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.
“As the missing records are currently unavailable, the requested subpoenas would not be duplicative of any other records either publicly available or produced in discovery.”
By Sam Dorman
