A federal grand jury working on issues related to January 6 issued a subpoena in May for all the Trump administration records provided to the House committee investigating January 6 by the National Archives.
A new report from The New York Times reveals the development. The subpoena, directly targeting the National Archives, was signed by Thomas Windom, a federal prosecutor tasked with leading key investigations into January 6-related matters at the Justice Department. As for what the House riot panel obtained, the tranche of materials was wide-ranging. The committee eventually dropped its request for certain national security-related records, but investigators evidently nonetheless eventually nabbed proposed talking points for the then-White House press secretary, a draft version of Trump’s January 6 speech before the riot, call logs, installments of the President’s Daily Diary, which catalogs a broad breadth of a president’s activities, and more.
The subpoena “suggests… that prosecutors believe evidence of a crime may exist in the White House documents the archives turned over to the House panel,” as the Times explains it. Trump, as could be expected considering his well-established penchant for litigation, went to court in an effort to stop the riot committee from obtaining certain records of his from the National Archives, but Trump’s effort failed, with the U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruling against him. Other files targeted by the panel that Trump hoped to shield included records associated with Mark Meadows, Stephen Miller, and Patrick Philbin. The third individual, a somewhat lesser-profile name, was deputy White House counsel.
Investigators at the Justice Department are following some of the same investigative paths established by the riot panel. Besides obtaining these docs, department investigators even obtained the cooperation of former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, to whom prosecutors reached out after her public committee testimony.
It’s unclear as of this point whether Trump himself might ever face criminal charges in connection to the Justice Department probe into January 6 and what led up to that fateful day. Over time, the department’s focus shifted from individual rioters to those whose conspiracies sat behind the violence, and relatively recent reporting indicated prosecutors were asking questions about Trump. Others targeted with subpoenas amid the Justice Department investigation include prominent “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander and multiple officials in state Republican parties. One particular area of interest for prosecutors is the multi-state scheme to fake electoral votes for Trump in states won by Biden.
