The House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol issued another wave of subpoenas on Tuesday to a number of former Trump administration officials, including senior adviser Stephen Miller and former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
With these latest subpoenas, the panel probing the deadly riot – where a mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s win – is moving closer and closer to the former president’s inner circle.
The newest batch of subpoenas comes just one day after the panel issued a wave of subpoenas to former Trump campaign and administration officials, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller.
The news also comes the same day that a federal judge rejected an effort by the former president to temporarily block the National Archives from turning over certain documents to the panel.
“The Select Committee wants to learn every detail of what went on in the White House on January 6th and in the days beforehand,” Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the committee, wrote in a statement. “We need to know precisely what role the former President and his aides played in efforts to stop the counting of the electoral votes and if they were in touch with anyone outside the White House attempting to overturn the outcome of the election.”
The panel wants to interview Miller, one of former President Donald Trump’s closest advisers, who “by his own account participated in efforts to spread false information about alleged voter fraud in the November 2020 election, as well as efforts to encourage state legislatures to alter the outcome of the November 2020 election by appointing alternate slates of electors.”
In seeking documents and testimony from McEnany, the panel is seemingly moving toward its other mission of not only investigating the Capitol attack itself, but also its origins – namely the lies that Trump spread about massive voter fraud, even though all 50 states had certified the election and courts across the country rejected his claims.
The panel wrote that McEnany “made multiple public statements from the White House and elsewhere about purported fraud in the November 2020 election,” also adding that she was reportedly with Trump as he watched the Jan. 6 attack.
“McEnany claimed that there were ‘very real claims’ of fraud that the former President’s reelection campaign was pursuing, and said that mail-in voting was something that ‘we have identified as being particularly prone to fraud,'” the panel wrote.
Separately, McEnany and Miller were both named in a Office of Special Counsel report Tuesday, which cited more than a dozen Trump administration officials violated the Hatch Act during the 2020 presidential election. The two former Trump officials were both cited for promoting Trump’s re-election campaign while acting in their respective official capacities.
The panel is also demanding documents and testimony from Keith Kellogg, former Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser, writing in the subpoena that it wants to hear from him because “you were with President Trump as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol unfolded and have direct information about the former president’s statements about, and reactions to, the Capitol insurrection.” It also says that according to several accounts, Kellogg urged Trump to send out a tweet aimed at helping to control the crowd.
Other former Trump aides subpoenaed include personal assistant Nicholas Luna, special assistant Molly Michael, deputy assistant Ben Williamson, deputy chief of staff Christopher Liddell, personnel director John McEntee, special assistant Cassidy Hutchinson and Justice Department official Kenneth Klukowski.
The committee said Klukowski communicated with senior Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark about a letter Clark sent to Georgia election officials urging them to delay certification of the voting results in that state because of purported fraud.
The letter also said Clark and Klukowski spoke before a Jan. 3 meeting at the White House in which Trump contemplated replacing acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen with Clark.
The committee has also subpoenaed Clark, who appeared for a deposition last week and declined to testify.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
