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| Photo Credit: AP. |
The Justice Department has seized the phones of two top advisers of former President Donald Trump and issued 40 subpoenas as part of its investigations into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 elections, The New York Times quoted people familiar with the inquiry as saying on Monday.
The House
Select Committee is also investigating the January 6 riot as well as roles
allegedly played by the former President and his allies in orchestrating the
deadly siege on Congress as lawmakers gathered to certify the victory of
President Joe Biden.
Did Trump make siren call to extremist on to over 2020 elections?
The panel
has been probing the former president’s ‘siren call’ to extremist to come to
Washington for his “Stop the Steal” crusade.
The rally
ended after Mr. Trump ordered his supporters to go to the Capitol to make their
voices heard which resulted in a deadly siege. The panel has been considering
other steps taken by the former President to overturn election results after
his defeat and his possible call to violence.
Trump and
his allies had filed dozens of lawsuits challenging the election victory in a
number of states on grounds that there was widespread voter fraud but those
lawsuits soon failed as several courts struck out the suits.
Frustrated
that he was not successfully at upturning the election results in court, Trump
tweeted the rally invitation, a pivotal moment, the committee said, according
to The Associated Press. The far-right Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and others
answered the call and a number of them came to Washington with guns ready to
take the battle to the field.
The panel
featured new video testimony from Pat Cipollone, a former Trump White House
counsel at the time of the incidence, recalling the explosive meeting when
Trump’s outside legal team brought a draft executive order to seize the states’
voting machines – a “terrible idea,” Cipollone said,
“That’s not
how we do things in the United States,” he testified.
An "unhinged" White House meeting - Hutchinson
In a
separate video testimony, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson called the
meeting “unhinged”.
Testimonies
also reveal how other White House officials scrambled to intervene as Trump met
late into the night with attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, retired national
security aide Michael Flynn and the former head of the online retail company
Overstock.
“Where is
the evidence?” Cipollone demanded of the claims of voter fraud, the outlet
reported.
“What they
were proposing, I thought, was nuts,” testified another official, Eric
Herschmann.
The
following morning Trump made a call for his supporters to come to Washington on
January 6 in a tweet saying “Be there, Will be wild.”
In a Jan. 4
text message from rally organizer Kylie Kremer to Trump ally Mike Lindell, the MyPillow
CEO, Kremer explains: “This stays only between us, we are having a second stage
at the Supreme Court again after the Ellipse. POTUS is going to have us march
there/the Capitol,” according to The Associated Press.
On the morning of January 5, Trump ally Ali Alexander sent a similar text to a conservative journalist saying: “Ellipse then US capitol. Trump is supposed to order us to capitol at the end of his speech but we will see,” according to the outlet.