Will he or won’t he?

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election voted unanimously Thursday to subpoena former President Donald Trump for documents and testimony.

Trump has not said whether he will comply or fight the summons. The former president released a letter Friday morning that attacked the House committee’s investigation, but he did not mention the subpoena. 

Trump has a history of fighting attempts to have him sit for interviews in legal cases and delaying proceedings. For those reasons, many observers are skeptical he’ll ever testify before the panel, which Republicans would likely dissolve if they win back control of the House this fall.

Trump’s former acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, told CNN on Friday morning he doesn’t think there’s a chance Trump will speak directly to the committee. 

“Is he thinking about it? Sure. That’s his nature,” Mulvaney said. “Does he want to tell his side of the story? He does. There's no way that he's actually going to testify.”

Sarah Matthews, a former deputy press secretary in the Trump White House who testified at a July committee hearing, agreed with Mulvaney.

“I just think there's no chance that he would,” she told CNN on Thursday. “If he has any good lawyers around him, they would advise him not to.”

But Trump appears to be sending signals that he’s at least open to the possibility.

A source close to Trump told Fox News Digital that the former president “loves the idea of testifying.” While Fox did not name the source, Trump’s Save America political action committee emailed a link to the article to his supporters Friday morning, seemingly suggesting it endorses the story.

The unnamed Fox source said if Trump testified, the former president would "talk about how corrupt the election was, how corrupt the committee was, and how Nancy Pelosi did not call up the National Guard that Trump strongly recommended for her to do three days earlier on January 3, 2021."

The source, however, added it’s unclear if Trump will actually speak to the committee.

The New York Times reported Thursday that Trump has privately been telling aides he favors testifying as long as it would be done in a live public hearing.

Gavin Smith, a former Trump White House official who is now a critic of the former president, told CNN that he believes it would be difficult for Trump to resist the limelight of a public hearing.

“I think in my time working for Donald Trump, one thing that I learned is simply Donald Trump can’t avoid a show,” Smith said. “So if the committee were to agree to carry this on national television, I'm just not convinced that he wouldn't show up for simply the fact that he could say he had the best ratings … all the things that Donald Trump likes to say.”

In January 2018, Trump told reporters he was “looking forward” to sitting down for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, who was investigating possible ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government. Ten months later, he provided written questions to Mueller’s team.

The only comment Trump has made about Thursday’s subpoena since the committee voted was in a Truth Social post in which he wrote: “Why didn’t the Unselect Committee ask me to testify months ago? Why did they wait until the very end, the final moments of their last meeting? Because the Committee is a total ‘BUST’ that has only served to further divide our Country which, by the way, is doing very badly - A laughing stock all over the World?”

Trump on Thursday promised a public response to the committee Friday morning, which some expected would include an answer about whether he intended to testify or not. The 14-page letter he released attacked the panel as partisan and politically motivated and repeated false claims about fraud in the 2020 presidential election but did not address the subpoena.

Trump’s options are to comply or fight the subpoena in the courts — which could extend into 2023 when the committee may no longer exist, making the point moot. 

If Trump refuses to comply, the panel could vote to make a criminal contempt-of-Congress referral to the Justice Department, which the full House must approve. The House has previously voted to recommend contempt charges for former Trump aides Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino. So far, the DOJ only elected to prosecute Bannon, who is scheduled to be sentenced next week after being convicted in a July trial.

Jan. 6 committee member Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., sidestepped a question from CNN on Friday morning about whether he expects Trump to actually testify, saying instead that “just a few of the former president’s closest advisers” have not complied with subpoenas and that the Bannon case proves “there are consequences.” 

“We're just focused on chasing the facts, and there are key questions that remain,” Aguilar said.

The last former president to testify before Congress was Gerald Ford, who faced the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution on March 1, 1983.

The last former president to be subpoenaed to testify on Capitol Hill was Harry Truman in 1953. He refused to comply with the Committee on Un-American Activities’ summons. The panel hoped to ask Truman about allegations that he knowingly appointed a Russian spy as assistant treasury secretary while he was president.

“It must be obvious to you that if the doctrine of separation of powers and the independence of the Presidency is to have any validity at all, it must be equally applicable to a President after his term of office has expired when he is sought to be examined with respect to any acts occurring while he is President,” Truman wrote in a letter to the committee.