Sept. 13 (UPI) — The Justice Department has issued about 40 subpoenas over the past week for witnesses to testify in the ongoing investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to news reports.
The subpoenas were issued to people the department wants to give testimony to a federal grand jury.
Multiple news outlets including The New York Times, CBS News, ABC News and Politico reported the recent subpoenas.
The reports also said that the department has seized phones belonging to two former Trump aides in their investigation of efforts to overturn the election.
Many of the grand jury subpoenas are said to have been issued in the past few days.
The actions represent a significant escalation by the Justice Department into the origins of the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, during which radical Trump supporters broke into the building, assaulted police officers, vandalized property and went looking for Democratic members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence.
The department and the FBI have arrested, charged, tried and sentenced a number of the Capitol rioters over the past year and a half, but they are still investigating the origins of the attack related to Trump, his allies and anyone else involved. The House Jan. 6 committee has also been heading a separate investigation into the attack, which caused multiple deaths.
One Trump ally, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, said through his attorney that he received a subpoena last week.
The Justice Department building is seen in Washington on August 10. The department has issued dozens of new subpoenas related to Donald Trump and efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. File Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI
Additionally, the news reports say that search warrants were issued last week to seize phones belonging to Boris Epshteyn, in-house counsel for Trump’s legal efforts, and Mike Roman, a campaign strategist and director of the former president’s Election Day operations.
The House Jan. 6 committee subpoenaed Epshteyn earlier this year along with three others tied to Trump’s post-election efforts — attorney Rudy Giuliani and legal aides Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell, all of whom repeatedly pushed Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 vote.
The news reports say that parts of the Justice Department investigation include Trump’s post-election fundraising and efforts to appoint false electors to overturn his defeat to Joe Biden in the presidential election. Biden beat Trump by 74 electoral votes and more than 7 million ballots in the national popular vote. In all, Biden won 81.2 million votes, the most ever for an elected president.
The new subpoenas come about a month after the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida looking for documents the former president took with him from the White House when he left office.
Agents found a number of records marked classified and top secret at the property, including empty folders and documents marked with the highest-possible top secret category, which often includes secrets on foreign governments and nuclear weapons.
That investigation has been temporarily paused after a Trump-appointed judge granted Trump’s request for a special master to review the documents and make a determination about whether Trump should have them. The judge’s ruling has been criticized by some legal experts and attorneys as an unusual act and the department is making efforts to resume the investigation as soon as possible.
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