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    Panel Provides New Evidence That G.O.P. Members of Congress Sought Pardons

    At least half a dozen Republican members of Congress sought pre-emptive pardons from President Donald J. Trump as he fought to remain in office after his defeat in the 2020 election, witnesses have told the House Jan. 6 committee, the panel disclosed on Thursday.Mr. Trump “had hinted at a blanket pardon for the Jan. 6 thing for anybody,” Mr. Trump’s former head of presidential personnel, Johnny McEntee, testified.Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, appeared to ask for a broad pardon, not limited to his role in Mr. Trump’s effort to reverse the outcome of the election. Mr. Gaetz even invoked the pardoned former President Richard M. Nixon as he did so, Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer for Mr. Trump, testified.“He mentioned Nixon, and I said, ‘Nixon’s pardon was never nearly that broad,’” Mr. Herschmann recounted.Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama sent an email seeking a pre-emptive pardon for all 147 members of Congress who objected to the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College win.A former adviser to Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, testified that Mr. Gaetz, Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona all expressed interest in pardons.She also testified that Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio “talked about” pardons but did not directly ask for one, and that she heard of newly elected Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia also expressing interest to the White House Counsel’s Office.Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida arriving at the Capitol in May.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesTaken together, the former White House aides portrayed members of Congress concerned about potential exposure to prosecution in the wake of their support for Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power. And the accounts provided an extraordinary, under-penalty-of-perjury portrait of efforts to use a president’s broad clemency powers for nakedly political purposes.In a statement, Mr. Perry denied seeking a pardon. “I stand by my statement that I never sought a presidential pardon for myself or other members of Congress,” he said. “At no time did I speak with Miss Hutchinson, a White House scheduler, nor any White House staff about a pardon for myself or any other member of Congress — this never happened.”Ms. Greene posted a clip of Ms. Hutchinson on Twitter and added: “Saying ‘I heard’ means you don’t know. Spreading gossip and lies is exactly what the January 6th Witch Hunt Committee is all about.” Mr. Gohmert also denied making such a request, and condemned the committee for how it has comported itself. Mr. Biggs similarly said that Ms. Hutchinson was “mistaken,” and that her testimony was edited “deceptively.”Mr. Gaetz did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Brooks confirmed seeking a pardon, but said it was because he believed the Justice Department would be “abused” by the Biden administration. He released the letter he sent the White House, in which he said he was putting the request in writing at the instruction of Mr. Trump.The fact that it had evidence that pardons were under discussion was previewed by the committee at an earlier hearing. And the panel previously revealed that a key figure in Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the results of the election, the conservative lawyer John Eastman, had emailed another Trump lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, after the Capitol riot, asking to be “on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”Mr. Eastman appeared before the committee and invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination repeatedly.It is unclear whether Mr. Gaetz’s reported request for a blanket pardon was driven by concerns about his attempts to overturn the election or other potential criminality. At the time Mr. Gaetz made the request, he had just come under Justice Department investigation for sex-trafficking a minor. He has not been charged.The question of who was getting pardons, and for what, was a source of enormous consternation in the final days of the Trump White House. The House select committee is using the information about the pardons to describe a broader effort to protect people who carried out Mr. Trump’s desires.In his final weeks, Mr. Trump randomly offered pardons to former aides who were jarred because they were not sure what he thought they had done that was criminal, two former officials have said. Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 6Making a case against Trump. More

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    5 Takeaways From Thursday’s Jan. 6 Hearing

    The House committee’s fifth hearing focused on President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to harness the powers of the Justice Department to remain in office. Relying on testimony of three former top Justice Department officials who played central roles in the episode, the committee laid out in detail how Mr. Trump and his allies in the department and on Capitol Hill sought to install a loyalist atop the Justice Department and reverse the election results from a key swing state.Here are five key takeaways.It was the most blatant attempt to use the Justice Department for political ends at least since Watergate.Mr. Trump aggressively pursued a plan to install as acting attorney general a little-known Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, who was prepared to take actions to reverse the election results. As they fought to head off the move, a group of White House lawyers and the leadership of the Justice Department feared that the plan was so ill-conceived and dishonest that it would have spiraled the country into a constitutional crisis if it had succeeded.The president came so close to appointing Mr. Clark that the White House had already begun referring to him as the acting attorney general in call logs from Jan. 3, 2021. Later that day, Mr. Trump had a dramatic Oval Office showdown with top Justice Department officials and White House lawyers, who told Mr. Trump that there would be a “graveyard” at the Justice Department if he appointed Mr. Clark because so many top officials would resign.In the meeting, Mr. Trump chastised the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, for refusing to do more to help him find election fraud. Only after hours of argument — partly about the lack of substance behind Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud but also about the political ramifications for him if he took action that led to the exodus of top Justice Department officials — did Mr. Trump relent and back off his plan to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark.The heart of the scheme was a draft letter to officials in Georgia.At the center of the plan was a letter drafted by Mr. Clark and another Trump loyalist that they hoped to send to state officials in Georgia. The letter falsely asserted that the department had evidence of election fraud that could lead the state to rethink its certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory there. The letter recommended that the state call its legislature into session to study allegations of election fraud and consider naming an alternate slate of electors pledged to Mr. Trump.The department’s top officials and Mr. Trump’s legal team in the White House were all appalled by the letter because it would be giving the imprimatur of the nation’s top law enforcement agencies to claims of election fraud that the department had repeatedly investigated and found baseless. The letter was so outrageous that a top White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, testified that he told Mr. Clark that if he became attorney general and sent the letter he would be committing a felony.The Justice Department’s acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, testified at the hearing that sending it would have been tantamount to the Justice Department intervening in the outcome of the election.“For the department to insert itself into the political process this way, I think would have had grave consequences for the country,” Mr. Donoghue said. “It may have spiraled us into a constitutional crisis.”Trump would not give up on his claims of fraud.Time after time, the White House brought baseless and sometimes preposterous claims of election fraud — including internet conspiracy theories — to Justice Department officials so that they could use the nation’s law enforcement powers to investigate them. And time after time, the department and the F.B.I. found the claims had no validity.The pattern became so extraordinary that at one point the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, sent a YouTube video to department officials from Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, that claimed an Italian defense contractor uploaded software to a satellite that switched votes from Mr. Trump.A top Defense Department official, Kashyap Patel, followed up with Mr. Donoghue about the claim, and the acting defense secretary, Christopher C. Miller, reached out to a defense attaché in Italy to discuss the claim, which was never substantiated.About 90 minutes after Mr. Donoghue had helped persuade Mr. Trump not to install Mr. Clark as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump would still not let go, calling Mr. Donoghue on his cellphone with another request: to look into a report that an immigration and customs agent in Georgia had seized a truck full of shredded ballots. There turned out to be nothing to it, Mr. Donoghue testified.Trump considered naming a loyalist lawyer as a special counsel.As Mr. Trump searched for any way to substantiate the false fraud claims, he tried to install a loyalist as a special counsel to investigate them. One of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Sidney Powell — who had become a public face of Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election — said in testimony played by the committee that Mr. Trump discussed with her the possibility of taking on that position in December.The committee also played testimony of William P. Barr, who was attorney general until the middle of December 2020, saying that there was no basis to appoint a special counsel. And the committee suggested that the idea was part of the larger effort to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s victory and open the door to Congress considering alternate slates of Trump electors from swing states.“So let’s think here, what would a special counsel do?” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, who led the day’s questioning. “With only days to go until election certification, it wasn’t to investigate anything. An investigation, led by a special counsel, would just create an illusion of legitimacy and provide fake cover for those who would want to object, including those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.”Mr. Kinzinger added: “All of President Trump’s plans for the Justice Department were being rebuffed.”Members of Congress sought pardons — and Trump considered the requests.In the days after Jan. 6, several of Mr. Trump’s political allies on Capitol Hill, who had helped stoke the false election claims and efforts to overturn the results, sought pardons from Mr. Trump, who considered granting them, according to testimony on Thursday.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 6Making a case against Trump. More

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    Abandoned by Trump, Mo Brooks Is Now Open to Testifying About Jan. 6

    Stinging from his resounding defeat in Alabama’s Republican runoff for the Senate on Tuesday and a snub from former President Donald J. Trump, Representative Mo Brooks now appears to be willing to testify as part of the Jan. 6 investigation.Mr. Brooks signaled on Wednesday that he would comply with an impending subpoena from the bipartisan House committee that is leading the inquiry into the attack on the Capitol — but only under certain conditions.His comments to the media, reported by CNN on Wednesday, came one day after he lost a bitter primary runoff to Katie Britt. Mr. Trump withdrew his endorsement of Mr. Brooks in March when he began slipping in the polls, and gave his support to Ms. Britt in the final weeks of the campaign.Mr. Brooks bemoaned his loss, telling a Politico reporter that the “bad guys won.”He hinged his willingness to testify before the House committee on being able to do so “in public so the public can see it — so they don’t get bits and pieces dribbled out,” Mr. Brooks said, according to CNN.The congressman added that he would only testify about matters related to Jan. 6, 2021, and that he wanted to see copies of documents that he might be asked about beforehand, the network reported.Mr. Brooks was not available for an interview on Thursday, and his office declined to elaborate on his comments.Mr. Brooks, a hard-right Republican and a once-fierce ally of Mr. Trump’s whom the former president has accused of becoming “woke,” has drawn intense scrutiny for his actions preceding the violence on Jan. 6.Outfitted in body armor at a rally before the siege, Mr. Brooks exhorted Mr. Trump’s election-denying supporters to start “kicking ass.”Investigators have also sought to question Mr. Brooks about his interactions with Mr. Trump in the aftermath of the attack. They zeroed in on Mr. Brooks’s comments in March, when he said that Mr. Trump had, since leaving office, repeatedly asked him to illegally “rescind” the 2020 election, remove President Biden and force a new special election.But as of Wednesday, Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the head of the Jan. 6 committee, acknowledged that Mr. Brooks still had not been served with a subpoena. Mr. Thompson said that process servers in Washington had been unable to track down Mr. Brooks because he had been campaigning in Alabama.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 6Making a case against Trump. More

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    Who Is Richard Donoghue?

    Richard P. Donoghue, who served as acting deputy attorney general in the Trump administration, was a crucial witness to President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to use the Justice Department to overturn the 2020 election results, and one of several officials there who pumped the brakes on the plan.Mr. Donoghue repeatedly pushed back on Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, and he refused to go along when Mr. Trump insisted that the department simply “say that the election was corrupt” and “leave the rest to me,” according to notes Mr. Donoghue took of a Dec. 27, 2020, call with Mr. Trump and Jeffrey A. Rosen, the acting attorney general.On Thursday, Mr. Donoghue was appearing in person before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol in a hearing at which aides said the panel would reveal new evidence of Mr. Trump’s bid to use the nation’s law enforcement apparatus to invalidate his defeat and stay in power.Much is already known about Mr. Trump’s efforts and the resistance by Mr. Donoghue and his colleagues, including that the president asked the Justice Department to send letters to state election officials warning them that there had been widespread fraud in the election and to file lawsuits to help his campaign.During a hearing on Tuesday, the House committee played audio of an interview with Mr. Donoghue in which he recounted telling Mr. Trump that there was no suitcase containing fraudulent ballots in Georgia, a popular conspiracy theory that was based on a video selectively edited and shared by Mr. Trump’s allies.Mr. Trump “kept fixating on this suitcase that supposedly had fraudulent ballots,” Mr. Donoghue said in the interview. “I said, ‘No, sir, there is no suitcase.’”Mr. Trump, in his final weeks in office, had also planned to oust Mr. Rosen, when it was clear that he did not have his support to send Georgia state legislators a letter wrongly stating that the department was seriously investigating accusations of voter fraud.Mr. Donoghue convened the department’s senior leaders over the phone, making a plan that the group would resign en masse should Mr. Rosen be fired.Mr. Trump ultimately allowed Mr. Rosen to stay. More

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    Will Merrick Garland Prosecute Trump? Should He?

    Readers discuss a guest essay weighing factors such as the likelihood of conviction and the political repercussions.Attorney General Merrick Garland.Jacquelyn Martin/Associated PressDrew Angerer/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “What Garland Needs to Decide Before Charging Trump,” by Jack Goldsmith (Opinion guest essay, June 22):If Professor Goldsmith is right, American democracy has already lost. In spelling out the difficulties that Attorney General Merrick Garland must overcome in order to prosecute Donald Trump in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection, Mr. Goldsmith all but concludes that the task is impossible. Prosecution will be portrayed as a political vendetta. Proving Mr. Trump’s guilty intent will be exceedingly hard, making an acquittal likely. And an acquittal will be seen by Mr. Trump and his supporters as a vindication.At the same time, Mr. Goldsmith concedes that a decision not to prosecute Mr. Trump will effectively place the president above the law. This bodes ill should Mr. Trump or someone like him again occupy the Oval Office.Is this really Mr. Garland’s only choice: a trial that threatens to tear an already divided nation apart, or allowing Mr. Trump to get away scot-free at the cost of undermining the rule of law? For the sake of democracy, there must be another option.Stephen NewmanTorontoThe writer is an associate professor of politics at York University.To the Editor:Jack Goldsmith is right to praise Attorney General Merrick Garland for “gathering as much information as possible” before deciding whether to prosecute former President Donald Trump for defrauding the American people and interfering with the work of Congress.Professor Goldsmith is wrong, however, to suggest that Mr. Garland’s decision to indict Mr. Trump would be “a cataclysmic event from which the nation would not soon recover.” The cataclysm is already here, and it is of Mr. Trump’s making, not Mr. Garland’s.Once and for all, we must stop Donald Trump’s big lies, his intimidation of anyone who opposes him and his thinly veiled calls to violence. The only solution is to impose the forceful countermeasures of the law.Mr. Trump rode the whirlwind, and he must now reap the consequences if our democracy is to survive.Eric W. OrtsPhiladelphiaThe writer is a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.To the Editor:I’m so tired of hearing about the damage we may inflict on the nation and the presidency by holding Donald Trump to the same standard as any other citizen. Such concerns must be weighed against the very real damage caused by future presidents following the precedent he has established, operating the White House like a mob boss and pardoning his cronies when they do his bidding.This is a crossroads for America. We can have only one standard for justice. Afford Donald Trump the same justice as any other citizen and let the chips fall where they may. When in doubt, perhaps it’s time to just default to doing the right thing.Lawrence LobertGrosse Pointe Park, Mich.To the Editor:Jack Goldsmith suggests that, in weighing whether to indict Donald Trump, Attorney General Merrick Garland must consider “whether the national interest would be served by prosecuting Mr. Trump.” It is, he argues, “a judgment call about the nature, and fate, of our democracy.”Quite so. And that is why Mr. Goldsmith errs in suggesting that the judgment should be made by Mr. Garland. Rather, it should be made by President Biden in deciding whether to pardon Mr. Trump. That is how the issue was resolved when President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, a compelling precedent for the current situation.Douglas M. ParkerOjai, Calif.The writer served in the White House Counsel’s Office during the Watergate investigations.To the Editor:Jack Goldsmith’s masterful exposition of the problems arising from seeking to hold Donald Trump criminally liable highlights the tragedy of the failure to remove him through the impeachment process. History will judge craven senators like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton as the villains responsible for an American tragedy. They knew better but refused to risk their personal political ambitions.How sad for America that the lessons of “Macbeth” elude so many United States senators.Allan RothAuburndale, Mass.The writer is a lawyer and a retired professor from Rutgers law and business schools.To the Editor:Jack Goldsmith identifies very legitimate concerns facing Attorney General Merrick Garland as he wades through the complexities of indicting, charging and prosecuting Donald Trump. And yet, it seems to me unconscionable and immoral to let Mr. Trump slither away from accountability given the mountain of evidence proving beyond any doubt that he very intentionally attempted to subvert the 2020 election.A possible Plan B? The district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, must move forward immediately and indict and prosecute Mr. Trump under that state’s laws. With the addition of the fruits of the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation, there is now more than enough evidence to charge Mr. Trump with state felony offenses that would likely land him behind bars and prevent him from ever running for public office again, which is the very least of what he deserves and this country needs.Laurie KorenbaumBrooklynThe writer is a former federal prosecutor.To the Editor:The nation is being held hostage by a sore loser. If Donald Trump is not held accountable for the events of Jan. 6, the precedent is set for every future election when the loser doesn’t agree with the outcome. We would invite anarchy in every election.I think it’s a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation, but the lack of consequences to bad behavior encourages more of the same.Fran HochmanGreat Neck, N.Y. More

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    Jan. 6 Panel Says It Has New Evidence of Trump’s Pressure on Justice Dept.

    A hearing at 3 p.m. Thursday will feature the former acting attorney general and other top officials at the department during the Trump era as witnesses.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol plans to unveil new evidence on Thursday about how President Donald J. Trump tried to manipulate the Justice Department to help him cling to power after he lost the 2020 election, aides said on Wednesday.At its fifth public hearing this month, scheduled for 3 p.m. on Thursday, the panel plans to hear testimony from three former top Justice Department officials who are expected to lay out the ways in which Mr. Trump tried to misuse the attorney general’s office to overturn his defeat, an extraordinary instance of a president interfering with the nation’s law enforcement apparatus for his own personal ends.Committee aides said the panel would detail how Mr. Trump unsuccessfully pushed department officials to falsely declare that there was widespread fraud in the election, file lawsuits to benefit his campaign and appoint a conspiracy theorist as a special counsel to investigate the election. It will also trace his failed efforts to send false letters to state officials to subvert the election results and, finally, to replace the acting attorney general, who refused to go along with his plans.Mr. Trump ultimately backed off after agency officials threatened mass resignations, but the committee is presenting his actions as a critical strand in a multilayered effort by the former president to subvert the election.The witnesses scheduled to testify are Jeffrey A. Rosen, the former acting attorney general; Richard P. Donoghue, the former acting deputy attorney general; and Steven A. Engel, the former assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.Day Four: The committee used its fourth hearing to show how Mr. Trump was personally involved in a scheme to put forward fake electors and highlight the pressure that state officials faced to overturn the election.Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois and a member of the committee, is expected to play a central role in the questioning of witnesses and presentation of evidence. He has hinted that the hearing could reveal more information about members of Congress who sought pardons after Jan. 6.The story of how Mr. Trump attempted to intervene in the workings of the Justice Department to keep himself in office has been well documented by both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Jan. 6 committee, but aides to the House inquiry said Thursday’s hearing will contain new revelations.Time and again, department officials told Mr. Trump after the election that his claims of widespread fraud were false, and prompted him to back down from some of his most extreme propositions.One dramatic moment came in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 3, 2021, when Jeffrey Clark, a little-known department lawyer who had been strategizing about how to keep Mr. Trump in power, suggested that the agency issue a legal opinion to Vice President Mike Pence advising him as to what actions he could take during the joint session of Congress set for three days later, when lawmakers were to meet for the official electoral count that would confirm Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.“That’s an absurd idea,” Mr. Engel interjected, according to testimony he provided to the committee. “It is not the role of the Department of Justice to provide legislative officials with legal advice on the scope of their duties.”Mr. Trump then spoke up and told the Justice Department officials, who repeatedly told him his claims of widespread fraud were false, that they were not to speak to Mr. Pence.“Nobody should be talking to the vice president here,” Mr. Trump said, according to Mr. Engel.Mr. Trump would go on to repeatedly push Mr. Pence to try to overturn the election results.Also at that meeting, Mr. Trump proposed firing Mr. Rosen, who was advising him that the 2020 election was not stolen, and replacing him with Mr. Clark, who was willing to do his bidding.“Sir, I would resign immediately,” Mr. Donoghue spoke up, according to a deposition he gave. “There is no way I’m serving one minute under this guy,” he said of Mr. Clark.Mr. Trump then turned to Mr. Engel and said, “Steve, you wouldn’t resign, would you?” Mr. Engel replied: “Absolutely I would, Mr. President. You’d leave me no choice.”The Justice Department officials were also witnesses to interactions between Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, and Mr. Trump. The committee has called for Mr. Cipollone to testify publicly, but he has so far refused.Mr. Cipollone pushed back against a plan put forward by Mr. Clark, who wanted to distribute official letters to multiple state legislatures falsely alerting them that the election may have been stolen and urging them to reconsider certified election results.“That letter that this guy wants to send — that letter is a murder-suicide pact,” Mr. Cipollone told Mr. Trump, according to Mr. Donoghue. “It’s going to damage everyone who touches it. And we should have nothing to do with that letter. I don’t ever want to see that letter again.”The panel is planning at least two more hearings for July, according to its chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi. Those sessions are expected to detail how a mob of violent extremists attacked Congress and how Mr. Trump did nothing to call off the violence for more than three hours. More

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    In Trump Electors Investigation, Justice Dept. Issues More Subpoenas

    Federal prosecutors sought information from two men who had worked on behalf of the Trump campaign and a third who signed up as a Trump elector in Georgia, a state won by President Biden.The Justice Department stepped up its criminal investigation of a plan by President Donald J. Trump and his allies to create slates of so-called fake electors in a bid to keep Mr. Trump in power during the 2020 election, as federal agents delivered grand jury subpoenas on Wednesday to at least four people connected to the plan.One of those who received a subpoena, 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 Mr. Trump’s electors in the state, which was won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.Another subpoena recipient was Thomas Lane, an official who worked on behalf of Mr. 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, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, who also served as a fake elector for Mr. Trump.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.Day Four: The committee used its fourth hearing to show how Mr. Trump was personally involved in a scheme to put forward fake electors and highlight the pressure that state officials faced to overturn the election.Mr. Shafer’s lawyer declined to comment. None of the other three men could be reached for comment about the subpoenas.The issuance of new subpoenas was reported earlier 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 Mr. Trump’s multiple and interlocking attempts to subvert the election. The other has focused on a wide cast of political organizers, White House aides and members of Congress connected in various ways to Mr. Trump’s incendiary speech near the White House that directly preceded the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.This latest round of activity in the Justice Department’s inquiry came amid the House Jan. 6 committee’s high-profile hearings into Mr. 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 Rudolph W. 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 Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Eastman and Mr. Chesebro, it is not clear what role, if any, some of the others might have played.The subpoenas, issued by a grand jury sitting in Washington, have also sought records and information about other pro-Trump figures like Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner and a longtime ally of Mr. Giuliani.Many of the lawyers named in the subpoenas were also mentioned on Tuesday at the House select committee’s public hearing exploring Mr. 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 Mr. Trump to the plan, introducing a recorded deposition from Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, in which she recounted how Mr. Trump called her and put Mr. Eastman on the phone “to talk about the importance of the R.N.C. 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 Mr. Trump himself.The plan to create pro-Trump electors in states won by Mr. Biden was among the earliest and most expansive of several plots by Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Trump and others close to him mounted a relentless effort in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6 to persuade Mr. Pence either to count the pro-Trump electors and hand Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. Trump could have won.Adam Goldman More