John McEntee, who served in the Trump administration as it wound down, has now testified before a federal grand jury in D.C. working on the Justice Department’s investigations of Trump. Generally speaking, those investigative efforts are now the responsibility of high-profile Special Counsel Jack Smith.
As might be expected, the contents of his questioning — and how he might have answered — weren’t immediately available, but McEntee worked directly on then-President Trump’s team and could thereby provide personal insight for investigators into what Trump and others were doing. For Congressional investigators, he has already outlined instances of Trump pressuring Mike Pence, who was then the vice president, to take action in disputed proceedings of Congress to stop Biden’s win. McEntee also personally participated in the pressure on Pence, drafting a series of arguments in favor of Pence taking action that he sent the then-VP’s chief of staff on January 1, days before the proceedings to certify the results.
Ahead of his grand jury testimony, McEntee was subpoenaed, CNN reports. In the White House, McEntee led a team focused on staffing — a role in which he could obviously exert significant power. He now leads a right-wing dating app called The Right Stuff, which hasn’t exactly taken off and become the new go-to.
Also recently testifying was Ken Cuccinelli, who held multiple roles in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump era and was even considered by the then-president for a role as special counsel as Donald and his allies sought to build a case in support of their false contentions of election fraud. Also considered was Sidney Powell, although the president isn’t ordinarily the official who appoints a special counsel at all, a responsibility that instead falls to the attorney general. Of course, Trump also wanted to replace the head of the Justice Department after the election with Jeffrey Clark, an official elsewhere in the department who supported his ambitions.
As Trump faced his exit, Cuccinelli was also asked about the prospect of seizing machines used in the election, a point on which he demurred, saying his area of authority didn’t have the legal standing to do so. Trump remains predictably mad about all of this, keeping up the pace of his complaints about the Smith investigations on Truth Social and now repeatedly referring to federal investigators as agents of the “Gestapo,” a Nazi secret police organization. Objectively, it obviously is utterly ridiculous to compare the FBI to the Gestapo, as it is to compare Democrats to Communists.
