Two Trump-era leaders of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been asked to sit down with the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to reporting from CNN.
According to the outlet, both Chad Wolf, the highest-ranking Trump DHS official, and Ken Cuccinelli, Wolf’s deputy, were asked to make voluntary appearances before the Jan. 6 committee. Both men served in an acting capacity.
A representative from Wolf’s consulting firm appeared to confirm to The Hill he had been asked for an interview, saying a meeting “hasn’t occurred yet, so we’re not going to make any statement on that.”
A request for comment from Cuccinelli left at the election project he runs housed within the Susan B. Anthony List organization was not immediately returned.
The outreach by the committee would show a renewed focus on DHS, whose intelligence office may have missed warning signs ahead of the Jan. 6 attack.
Reporting from The Wall Street Journal found DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis on Jan. 5 sent a national summary to law enforcement across the country stating there was “nothing significant to report.”
And reporting from Politico recently showed the delay from DHS intelligence in recognizing the attack, sending an update to the Pentagon at 1:30 p.m. that day saying there had been “no major incidents of illegal activity” over the last two hours. The update from wing of DHS designed to send late-breaking alerts to leaders was sent more than a half-hour after rioters had breached barricades around the Capitol.
And the interest in Cuccinelli follows reporting from The New York Times that Rudy Giuliani, then former President Trump’s personal lawyer, contacted Cuccinelli in December of last year asking if DHS has the authority to seize voting machines.
Cuccinelli told CNN Tuesday that he relayed to Giuliani that DHS had no such authority nor the ability to interfere in any state election administration.
“No one at any level pushed us to do anything outside of our existing mission sets,” he told CNN.
In addition to his work at the Election Transparency Initiative, Cuccinelli is also a fellow at the Center for Renewing America, where Kash Patel, a former Defense Department official subpoenaed by the committee, also serves as a senior fellow.
Representatives for the Jan. 6 committee did not respond to request for comment.
The committee is more broadly investigating pressure campaigns Trump officials made at other agencies, including the Department of Justice.
The panel is slated to interview Jeffrey Clark on Friday, a former Justice Department official who became a leading advocate for Trump within the office, pushing leaders there to send a letter to state election officials including Georgia asking them to delay certification of election results.
CNN reported Tuesday that five former White House officials have recently volunteered to sit down with the committee, part of a broader effort by the Jan. 6 committee to speak with a broad array of Trump-era officials outside of a formal deposition.