January 6 committee issues 6 subpoenas to top Trump campaign associates, including Michael Flynn and John Eastman

CNN

By Zachary Cohen, Ryan Nobles and Annie Grayer, CNN

The House select committee investigating the deadly January 6 riot on Capitol Hill announced Monday it is issuing six additional subpoenas to top Trump campaign associates as it continues to seek testimony and documents from key witnesses in the sweeping probe.

With this round of subpoenas, the committee is targeting top individuals from former President Trump’s reelection campaign who the panel says were involved in promoting the lie that the presidential election was stolen.

The six subpoenas are going to:

• Trump 2020 campaign manager William Stepien
• Former senior adviser to the campaign Jason Miller
• John Eastman, an attorney who helped craft Trump’s argument that the election was stolen
• Michael Flynn, who was involved in meeting about how the Trump campaign wanted to promote the lie that the election was stolen
• Angela McCallum, national executive assistant to former President Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign
• Bernard Kerik, who participated in a meeting at the Willard Hotel centered around overturing election results.

All six individuals are being asked to supply the committee with documents on November 23, with depositions scheduled spanning the last week of November into mid December.

“In the days before the January 6th attack, the former President’s closest allies and advisors drove a campaign of misinformation about the election and planned ways to stop the count of Electoral College votes,” Select Committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson said in a statement. “The Select Committee needs to know every detail about their efforts to overturn the election, including who they were talking to in the White House and in Congress, what connections they had with rallies that escalated into a riot, and who paid for it all.”

Thompson added: “The Select Committee expects all witnesses to cooperate with our investigation as we work to get answers for the American people, recommend changes to our laws that will strengthen our democracy, and help ensure nothing like January 6th ever happens again.”

This is the first round of subpoenas issued by the committee since the House asked the Department of Justice to pursue criminal contempt charges against Trump ally Steve Bannon for defying his congressional order to appear and provide testimony.

The Justice Department has not yet indicated whether prosecutors will pursue an indictment against Bannon.

On Friday, former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark stonewalled the committee, appearing before the panel pursuant to a subpoena but declining to answer questions posed to him, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

The committee writes in their subpoena letter to Stepien that his role as Trump’s former campaign manager makes him a key player to understanding the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and promote the “Stop the Steal” narrative that rioters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6 echoed.

The committee cites an anonymous interview of a witness with personal knowledge to help back up its claim that Stepien was deeply involved in the messaging behind the campaign’s “Stop the Steal” effort. The committee, in its subpoena letter to him, also cites an internal campaign memo from shortly after the election that demonstrated the Trump campaign knew that the claims about the voting machine company, Dominion Voting Systems, were baseless.

Kerik previously confirmed to CNN that he paid for rooms and suites in Washington, DC, hotels that “served as election-related command centers,” according to the committee. He also worked with Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani “to investigate allegations of voter fraud and promote baseless litigation and ‘Stop the Steal’ efforts,” the committee noted Monday.

In February, Make America Great Again PAC, the successor organization to the Trump presidential campaign, made two large disbursements for “recount travel expenses,” according to a filing to the Federal Election Commission. The PAC paid Kerik’s company and Giuliani’s company $66,251.54 and $76,566.95, respectively.

CNN previously reported that Eastman wrote an email that blamed Pence for causing the violence at the US Capitol on January 6 with his refusal to block Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results — as the riot was occurring and the then-vice president hid from the mob who had breached the building.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland and member of the committee, previously told CNN the panel is interested in learning more about Eastman’s role in attempting to overturn the election results.

“We need to determine to what extent there was an organized effort against Vice President Pence and we believe that, you know, some of the actors’ names have become known, including John Eastman, who laid it out in a memo,” Raskin said last month.

To McCallum, the committee writes that its investigation and public accounts have led the panel to believe that her role as National Executive Assistant to Trump’s reelection campaign made her aware of and involved in the campaign’s efforts to spread false information about voter fraud in the presidential election.

The committee cites a “publicly available” voicemail recording in its possession that McCallum left for an unknown Michigan state representative asking whether the Trump campaign could “count on” that representative, while also telling the legislator that they had the ability to appoint an alternate slate of electors, even though the Michigan state Legislature never took that action.

The committee is interested in Flynn, who served as Trump’s first national security adviser and has remained a staunch ally of the former President since being fired in 2017, because he reportedly attended a December 2020 Oval Office meeting “during which participants discussed seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency, invoking certain national security emergency powers, and continuing to spread the false message that the November 2020 election had been tainted by widespread fraud.”

“The day before, Flynn gave an interview on Newsmax TV during which he talked about seizing voting machines, foreign influence in the election, and the purported precedent for deploying military troops and declaring martial law to ‘rerun’ the election,” the committee said Monday.

In their subpoena letter to Miller, the committee claims that the former senior adviser used his position of power and prominence within Trump’s campaign orbit to peddle lies about election fraud. The committee cites Miller’s role in coordinating news conferences with Trump and Giuliani to claim that the election was rigged as one of the reasons why he is of interest to their investigation.

The committee also points to Miller’s presence at a meeting on January 5 at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, which became known as a command center for Trump allies specifically focused on how to overturn the November results and pressure then-Vice President Pence to not certify the Electoral College results.

This story has been updated with additional developments Monday.

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CNN’s Michael Warren contributed to this report.