The House committee investigating the deadly Capitol invasion said Monday it issued subpoenas to several high-profile allies of former President Donald Trump, including former national security advisor Michael Flynn and former campaign advisor Jason Miller.
Also subpoenaed was John Eastman, the lawyer who spoke at Trump’s rally outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 before the riot began. Eastman is the author of an infamous memo that laid out a legally dubious case for Vice President Mike Pence to reject Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory in the 2020 election.
The other Trump associates to be issued subpoenas were Bill Stepien, the Trump 2020 campaign manager; Angela McCallum, national executive assistant to that campaign; and Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who reportedly participated in a meeting at a Washington hotel the night before the invasion, wherein Trump’s allies brainstormed efforts to overturn the election.
Miller, along with former senior Trump advisor Steve Bannon and Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, was also reportedly involved in that Jan. 5 meeting at D.C.’s Willard hotel.
The group of Trump allies, the latest to be subpoenaed for documents and testimony by the Jan. 6 select committee are “tied to efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election,” the panel said.
The six figures’ depositions are scheduled to take place between the end of November and mid-December. MacCallum is set to be deposed first on Nov. 30, followed by Kerik, Flynn, Eastman and Miller, with the final deposition for Stepien scheduled for Dec. 13.
The 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,” Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a statement.
Thompson said the committee expects all witnesses to cooperate with its probe to “help ensure nothing like January 6th ever happens again.”
Less than three weeks earlier, the House voted to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena to hand over documents to the committee and sit for a deposition.
Robert Costello, an attorney for Bannon, had told the committee that the former Trump advisor would not comply with the subpoena in accordance with a directive from Trump’s counsel, who argued that the materials were protected by executive privilege.
The select committee rejected that claim. The Biden administration declined to invoke that privilege to prevent the Archivist of the United States from sending a tranche of records to the House investigators.
Trump has sued to block the congressional committee’s requests for records from the White House during his single term in office.
The committee leaders said at the time of the contempt vote that dozens of witnesses and entities have been contacted as part of the probe, but that Bannon was the only person to completely defy one of its subpoenas.
On Friday, the panel warned ex-Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark that it will take “strong measures to hold him accountable” after he allegedly refused to answer any questions during a closed-door interview.
After the 2020 race was called for Biden, Clark had proposed that the Justice Department encourage key states to reject their presidential electors, according to a Senate Judiciary Committee report titled “Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election.”
The select committee is tasked with investigating the facts and causes of the Jan. 6 invasion, when hundreds of Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol and forced a joint session of Congress to flee their chambers.
Shortly before the rioters broke into the building, Trump — who had spent months spreading a wide array of election-fraud conspiracy theories — told throngs of his supporters to march to the Capitol and pressure Republicans to reject the election results.
The attack led to multiple deaths and temporarily stopped lawmakers from confirming Biden’s electoral victory. Trump has never conceded to Biden, and he continues to proliferate debunked and baseless claims about the 2020 election being rigged against him — a falsehood dubbed the “Big Lie” by his critics.
The panel, comprising seven Democrats and two Republicans, was formed over the summer by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. An earlier bill to set up a “9/11-style” commission would have allowed Democratic and Republican leaders to each appoint half of the members, but Senate Republicans shot down that proposal.
