The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol released six new subpoenas Monday, targeting top campaign aides of former President Trump, the man behind the memo encouraging the campaign to focus on Congress’s certification of the vote, and others involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Here are the committee’s latest targets:
John Eastman
Eastman, a former law professor, put himself at the center of the effort to overturn the 2020 election when he drafted two memos laying out Trump’s options for unwinding the results.
Those memos became a blueprint for the Trump team in eyeing both Congress and the states as potential avenues, likely igniting Trump’s focus on having former Vice President Mike Pence buck the largely ceremonial duty of certifying the 2020 election results.
One of Eastman’s memos proposed a six-part plan of action, while the other delved deeper into potential options for the campaign. Together they outline paths both to use supposed vice presidential authority to push back on election results and to get state legislatures to reject electors from certain states in order to deny President Biden a majority of the Electoral College vote.
Eastman had a busy first few days of January, hosting a Jan. 2 meeting with some 300 state legislators during which he told them it was “the duty of the state legislatures to fix this, this egregious conduct and make sure that we’re not putting in the White House some guy that didn’t get elected.”
On Jan. 3, he met with Trump and Pence to break down his six-step memo, including what Eastman argued was vice presidential authority to reject election results.
On Jan. 5, he attended the “war room” meetings at the Willard Hotel where former Trump White House strategist Stephen Bannon, also subpoenaed by the committee, and Rudy Giuliani met the day before the deadly riot.
And on Jan. 6, he spoke at the rally near the White House that preceded the attack, reportedly later emailing Pence’s lawyer, arguing the siege “is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary.”
“You appear to have been instrumental in advising President Trump that Vice President Pence could determine which electors were recognized on January 6, a view that many of those who attacked the Capitol apparently also shared,” the committee wrote in its subpoena.
Michael Flynn
Flynn was a proponent of Trump’s false election claims during the transition period and in December suggested Trump could use martial law to reverse the election results.
Trump’s relationship with Flynn goes back to his 2016 presidential campaign, when Flynn was a top campaign surrogate for the GOP nominee. Flynn went on to serve as Trump’s first national security adviser, before he was removed after less than a month for lying to Pence and the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the campaign.
Flynn was eventually charged by special counsel Robert Mueller in 2017 for lying to the FBI and agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with the investigation to lessen his sentence. Flynn sought to rescind his plea in early 2020, months before Trump pardoned his former adviser. Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, was briefly aligned with the Trump campaign legal team and promoted conspiracy theories about election fraud in 2020.
The committee’s interest in Flynn comes after he reportedly attended a December meeting at the White House, during which participants discussed declaring a national emergency as a route for seizing voting machines.
It also follows a move by the panel to seek voluntary interviews with former Department of Homeland Security acting officials Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli about discussions at the White House to seize voting machines.
Beyond Flynn’s participation in the December meeting at the White House where they discussed seizing voting machines, the subpoena also notes his appearance on Newsmax, during which he “talked about seizing voting machines, foreign influence in the election, and the purported precedent for deploying military troops and declaring martial law to ‘rerun’ the election.”
Bill Stepien
Stepien is a longtime GOP operative who replaced Brad Parscale as Trump’s campaign manager in the months leading up to the election. Stepien was involved in the Trump campaign’s efforts to mount legal challenges to vote totals in several states after the November 2020 election.
Stepien worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign and later served as White House political director. Before working for Trump, he was an aide to then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) during the time of the “Bridgegate” scandal.
The committee’s focus on Stepien includes his participation in the “Stop the Steal” effort, including fundraising and messaging that “included the promotion of certain false claims related to voting machines despite an internal campaign memo in which campaign staff determined that such claims were false.”
Jason Miller
Miller served as a senior adviser to the Trump campaign in 2020 after working as a communications director on Trump’s 2016 White House bid.
Miller was a key public-facing figure as the Trump campaign pursued legal challenges to the 2020 election results, holding press calls with reporters to insist Trump would eventually be declared the winner of states like Arizona, and appearing on television stations including Newsmax to argue the campaign had evidence of voter fraud in states like Wisconsin.
He went on to serve as the main spokesperson for Trump after he left office in January until he left for a role on the social media platform GETTR in June.
The subpoena for Miller says he “regularly spread the claim that the November 2020 [election] had been tainted by widespread fraud,” noting that even before the election he said Democrats would “steal” the election.
“After the election, you reportedly coordinated with Mr. Trump and Rudolf Giuliani to hold public press events to claim that the election was rigged,” the subpoena states.
Angela McCallum
McCallum worked as the national executive assistant of Election Day operations at the Trump 2020 campaign and initially joined the organization as its coordinator of outreach to elected officials.
McCallum’s subpoena focuses more on the pressure campaign on state legislators, asking about a voicemail she left to a Michigan state representative whether the campaign could “count on” them to appoint new electors based on unfounded claims of voter fraud.
McCallum has worked in GOP politics since graduating college in 2019. She interned at the Trump White House in the Office of Cabinet Affairs after graduation before going on to join the Trump campaign.
Following her stint with the Trump campaign, McCallum worked for the National Republican Senatorial Committee on the Georgia Senate runoffs in January, when Republicans lost both seats and control of the chamber as a result.
Bernard Kerik
Kerik is a former New York City police commissioner and Giuliani associate.
Like Flynn, he was pardoned by Trump in his last year in office after he pleaded guilty to tax fraud and lying to the government.
The committee’s interest in Kerik is largely in his financial backing for booking rooms at the Willard Hotel, which the Trump campaign used as a “war room” and headquarters for contesting the election.
Kerik told The Washington Post his firm billed the Trump campaign more than $55,000 for rooms for the legal team and another $10,000 in other travel expenses. He also reportedly led efforts to investigate claims of voter fraud.
“I believed until Inauguration Day that something could be done — that’s why the fight was still going on,” Kerik told the Post. “There were a lot of people who thought on the sixth that it was over, but I didn’t believe that because the evidence seemed so overwhelming to me.”