Trump allies issued subpoenas in ‘fake elector’ probe

Washington: US authorities have stepped up the criminal investigation of a plan by Donald Trump and his allies to create slates of so-called fake electors in a bid to keep Trump in power during the 2020 election, as federal agents delivered grand jury subpoenas to at least four people connected to the plan.

One of those who received a subpoena on Wednesday (US time), according to two people familiar with the matter, was Brad Carver, a lawyer and official of the Georgia Republican Party who claimed to be one of Trump’s electors in the state, which was won by Joe Biden.

An image of former President Donald Trump is displayed as the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol continues to reveal its findings of a year-long investigation.Credit: Bloomberg

Another subpoena recipient was Thomas Lane, an official who worked on behalf of Trump’s campaign in Arizona and New Mexico, the people said.

A third person, Shawn Flynn, a Trump campaign aide in Michigan, also got a subpoena, according to the people familiar with the matter.

A fourth subpoena was issued to David Shafer, chair of the Georgia Republican Party, who was a fake elector for Trump.

Shafer’s lawyer declined to comment. None of the other three men could be reached for comment about the subpoenas.

The Justice Department’s issuance of new subpoenas was first reported by The Washington Post.

The fake elector plan is the focus of one of two known prongs of the Justice Department’s broad grand jury investigation of Trump’s multiple and interlocking attempts to subvert the election. The other has focused on a wide cast of political organisers, White House aides and members of Congress connected in various ways to Trump’s incendiary speech near the White House that directly preceded the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

This latest round of activity in the Justice Department’s inquiry came amid the House January 6 committee’s high-profile hearings into Trump’s efforts to reverse the outcome of the election.

It also comes less than a month after an earlier round of grand jury subpoenas revealed that prosecutors were seeking information on any role that a group of pro-Trump lawyers might have played in the fake elector effort. Those lawyers included Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn, Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro, James Troupis and Justin Clark. Although testimony to the House committee has presented evidence of the roles of some of them in the plan, including Giuliani, Eastman and Chesebro, it is not clear what role, if any, some of the others might have played.

David Shafer, who Donald Trump endorsed as the chair of the Georgia state Republican Party, after Shafer helped stoke false claims that fraud played a role in Trump’s election loss. Credit: AP

The subpoenas, issued by a grand jury sitting in Washington, have also sought records and information about other pro-Trump figures like Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner and a longtime ally of Giuliani.

Many of the lawyers named in the subpoenas were also mentioned Tuesday at the House select committee’s public hearing exploring Trump’s wide-ranging pressure campaign to persuade state officials to help him stay in office.

At the hearing, the committee for the first time directly connected Trump to the plan, introducing a recorded deposition from Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, in which she recounted how Trump called her and put Eastman on the phone “to talk about the importance of the RNC helping the campaign gather these contingent electors.”

The first subpoenas in the fake elector inquiry were largely sent to people in key swing states who almost took part in the plan but eventually did not for various reasons. This new round of subpoenas appears to be the first time that Trump campaign officials were brought into the investigation, marking a small but potentially significant step closer to Trump himself.

The plan to create pro-Trump electors in states won by Biden was among the earliest and most expansive of several plots by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the election. It involved lawyers, state officials, White House and campaign aides, and members of Congress.

The plan was developed as Trump and his allies sought to promote baseless assertions of widespread election fraud in key swing states and persuade state officials to reverse their certification of Biden’s victory. It aimed to have the pro-Trump slates in place by the time vice president Mike Pence oversaw the official certification of electoral votes during a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.

Trump and others close to him mounted a relentless effort in the weeks leading up to January 6 to persuade Pence either to count the pro-Trump electors and hand Trump a victory in the Electoral College or to declare that the election was uncertain because competing slates of electors had been received in several states.

The idea was to buy Trump more time to pursue his baseless claims of fraud or potentially to send the election to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation would get a single vote. Because more delegations were controlled by Republicans than by Democrats, Trump could have won.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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