The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack has issued new subpoenas to lawyers for Donald Trump suspected to be involved in efforts to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
The subpoenas – authorized hours before Biden’s first State of the Union address – targeted documents and testimony from Cleta Mitchell, Kurt Olsen, Katherine Freiss, Phillip Kline, Kenneth Chesebro and the pro-Trump One America News host Christina Bobb.
“The select committee is seeking information about attempts to disrupt or delay the certification of electoral votes and any efforts to corruptly change the outcome of the 2020 election,” said Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the panel.
“The six individuals we’ve subpoenaed today all have knowledge related to those matters and will help the select committee better understand all the various strategies employed to potentially affect the outcome of the election,” Thompson said.
The subpoenas reflect the panel’s focus on Trump’s schemes to stop Biden’s certification from taking place, so that the former president’s associates could buy time to co-opt state legislatures to send Trump slates of electors to return him to office.
The Guardian previously reported that Trump was himself intimately involved in the scheme and called the Trump “war room” set up in the Willard hotel in Washington the night before the Capitol attack to discuss ways to stop Biden’s certification from happening entirely.
The Trump operatives involved in the Willard operation included Bobb, who joined the legal team at the hotel led by Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani and another Trump lawyer, John Eastman.
The select committee said they subpoenaed Bobb as she was also involved in drawing up a draft executive order that would have directed federal agencies to seize voting machines in states Biden narrowly won over Trump on the basis of claims of election fraud.
Mitchell was subpoenaed, the panel said, after she appeared to have contacts with GOP lawmakers and participated in the infamous phone call when Trump pressured Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensberger to “find” votes to reverse his loss in the state.
The select committee also ordered documents and testimony from Freiss, a Trump lawyer who the panel said played a role in drawing up the draft executive order to seize voting machines.
The Guardian reported that one version of the draft executive order was reviewed by Trump at a December 2020 White House meeting, and then verbally agreed to appoint Sidney Powell, another Trump attorney and conspiracy theorist, as special counsel to probe election fraud.
Olsen pressured the justice department to open an investigation into election fraud, according to an interim Senate judiciary committee report released last year.
Olsen also helped to draw up a draft executive order for Trump that would have directed the justice department to “take voter action” and, citing documents on file with the panel, had multiple calls with Trump on 6 January, the select committee said.
Kline convened a meeting with 300 state legislators in an attempt to encourage them to sign a letter urging Mike Pence, then the vice-president, to delay the certification.
Chesebro actively promoted legal theories within the Trump campaign supporting the use of slates of bogus electors in states the former president lost, the select committee chairman said in his subpoena letter.
