Jan. 6 panel will show evidence on fake electors to Justice Dept.
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has asked the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol for evidence it has accumulated about the scheme by President Donald Trump and his allies to put forward false slates of pro-Trump electors in battleground states won by Joe Biden in 2020.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, DMiss., chairman of the committee, disclosed the request to reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, and a person familiar with the panel’s work said discussions with the Justice Department about the false elector scheme were ongoing. Those talks suggest the department is sharpening its focus on that aspect of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, one with a direct line to the former president.
Thompson said the committee was working with federal prosecutors to let them review the transcripts of interviews the panel has done with people who were so-called alternate electors for Trump. Thompson said the Justice Department’s investigation into “fraudulent electors” was the only specific topic the agency had broached with the committee.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment.
For weeks, the Justice Department has been negotiating with the Jan. 6 panel about turning over transcripts of its interviews to federal prosecutors. The agency has asked the committee for copies of every transcript of each of its more than 1,000 interviews, while the committee has pushed back, requesting that the department narrow its request.
Thompson’s comments Wednesday
were the clearest indication yet of what the Justice Department is looking for.
“We’re in the process of negotiating how that information will be viewed,” Thompson said, adding that he believed Justice Department officials would make an appointment with the committee to review the transcripts in person. “We’re engaging.”
The Justice Department has been investigating the scheme to put forward fake electors for months and has issued subpoenas to top Trump lawyers who worked on the plan.
Last month, the committee tied the former president directly to the scheme and presented fresh details on how Trump sought to bully, cajole and bluff his way into invalidating his 2020 defeat in states around the country.
The committee presented evidence that Trump sought to persuade lawmakers in battleground states won by Biden to create the slates of alternate electors supporting him, hoping that
Vice President Mike Pence would use them to subvert the normal democratic process when he oversaw Congress’ official count of electoral votes Jan. 6.
The plan appears to have been set in motion days after the election, when pro-Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell sent an email suggesting the idea to John Eastman, another lawyer close to Trump.
By Nov. 18, 2020, another proTrump lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, had joined the effort, writing a memo suggesting that the Trump campaign should organize its allies in several swing states to draft fake slates of electors.
Around Thanksgiving, still others signed on to the plan, including Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, according to a recorded deposition from Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows.
Eventually, the Republican National Committee was brought in as well, Chairwoman
Ronna McDaniel said in a recorded deposition played at a hearing last month.
McDaniel testified that Trump had called her and put Eastman on the phone “to talk about the importance of the RNC helping the campaign gather these contingent electors.”
All of this was allowed to go forward, the Jan. 6 committee said, despite the fact that several lawyers for the Trump campaign believed it was illegal.
The committee also has accumulated evidence about the scheme from the so-called alternate electors themselves, issuing subpoenas to more than a dozen of them. Some of those who received subpoenas, including electors from Georgia, have sat for interviews with the panel.
The interest in the fake elector scheme came as the committee has referred the issue of Trump’s potential interference with witnesses to the Justice Department.
In recent weeks, the panel learned that two people called Hutchinson in what she characterized as an attempt to influence her testimony. The committee revealed Tuesday that Trump personally tried to reach a witness.
“It’s highly unusual,” Thompson said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “That’s why we, more or less, put that in the hands of the Justice Department.”
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said some Republicans had tried to dismiss the matter by suggesting Trump might have accidentally dialed the witness.
“But if the former president was trying to interfere with a witness, that would be, obviously, a very serious allegation,” said Romney, who voted last year to convict Trump on the impeachment charge of inciting insurrection.