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The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection issued subpoenas Monday to six top advisers to President Donald Trump, including two who were active in the Willard hotel “command center” where Trump’s loyal backers oversaw efforts in January to overturn the 2020 election.

Those subpoenaed to provide testimony and documents include scholar John Eastman, who outlined a legal strategy in early January to delay or deny Joe Biden the presidency, and former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, who led efforts to investigate voting fraud in key states. Both were present at the Willard during the first week in January.

The list also includes three members of the Trump reelection campaign: campaign manager Bill Stepien; Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the campaign; and Angela McCallum, the national executive assistant to Trump’s campaign. The committee also issued a subpoena for Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

All of them reportedly participated in discussions about challenging the election results, although Stepien, according to published reports, was initially skeptical of claims by some of Trump’s legal advisers, including his former personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Eastman has become a witness of keen interest to the committee because of the role he played laying out legal scenarios to deny Biden the presidency, including during an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4 with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

At the command center, Eastman huddled with Trump advisers including Giuliani, former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and Kerik to develop plans to pressure Pence to take actions on Jan. 6 that Eastman suggested were within the vice president’s powers. Those actions included blocking or delaying the counting of electoral votes from battleground states where results were in dispute.

Those states became the focus of the effort inside the Willard hotel command center to find evidence of fraud that might compel state legislators to challenge Biden’s victory.

In those first days in January, Trump allies in the command center called members of Republican-dominated legislatures in swing states that Eastman had spotlighted in his memos, including Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, encouraging them to convene special sessions to investigate fraud and to reassign electoral college votes from Biden to Trump.

Kerik said he had been working with Giuliani since two days after the election and that they continued until Jan. 19. “I believed until Inauguration Day that something could be done — that’s why the fight was still going on,” Kerik told The Washington Post in a recent interview.

Kerik and Giuliani stayed in Washington in early November at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, according to Kerik, and moved to the Willard at the end of December.

Eastman stayed at the Willard from Jan. 3 until after breakfast on Jan. 8, according to records showing that the hotel charged $1,407 for his lodging and meals during that time.

He arrived at the Willard on the same day that Trump organized an Oval Office meeting to discuss replacing then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey B. Clark, a Justice Department official close to Eastman who proposed that the department push for probes of Trump’s election fraud claims in Georgia and elsewhere. Rosen, other department officials and White House counsel Pat Cipollone all threatened to resign during the three-hour meeting if Clark were appointed.

The committee had earlier subpoenaed Clark, but<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/jan-6-committee-warns-trump-doj-official-he-must-cooperate-with-investigation-or-it-will-move-aggressively-against-him/2021/11/05/ffee8fc4-3e8b-11ec-bfad-8283439871ec_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com"> he refused to answer questions </a>in a closed-door interview on Friday. The committee also sought documents Eastman had prepared making the case that the vice president had authority under the constitution to delay or reject electoral results from key states.

Eastman’s first memo on the topic, only two pages long, described a six-point plan by which Pence could effectively commandeer the electoral counting process and enable Trump to win. The memo was first revealed last month in the book “Peril,” by Washington Post writers Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

Eastman has said that memo was a “preliminary draft” of a more complete and nuanced memo that outlined multiple possible outcomes following the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6. The ideas in the memos were the basis for a discussion of options Pence had with Eastman and Trump in the Oval Office on Jan. 4, he has said.

However, Pence still resisted embracing Eastman’s plan. On the evening of Jan. 5, according to “Peril,” Trump called Giuliani and then Bannon, who were both at the Willard at the time, according to the book, which reported some details of the events at the Willard that day. Trump told Bannon that Pence had been “very arrogant” when the two discussed the matter earlier in the day, the book reported. The following day, Eastman spoke at the rally on the Ellipse.

Eastman did not respond to messages from The Post. But Kerik issued a fiery statement Monday evening rejecting suggestions in a committee press statement that he was “involved in efforts to promote false claims of election fraud.”

“I am demanding that the Committee either retract this defamatory press release and apologize or admit this is a purely partisan stunt,” Kerik said, adding that he believes there is overwhelming evidence of irregularities and fraud in the 2020 election.

“I will not be threatened, intimidated, forced into bankruptcy or silenced” by the committee, which Kerik said is “targeting patriots and members of the President’s legal team that wanted nothing more than to investigate and expose” election irregularities. Kerik said he would work “to ensure that the facts and evidence we collected are produced … in the hopes that the American people will demand accountability in our election process.”

In its letter to Flynn, the committee asked specifically about Flynn’s attendance at a Dec. 18 meeting in the Oval Office “during which participants discussed seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency, invoking certain national security emergency powers and continuing to spread the message” that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud.

The letter noted that the previous day, Flynn had spoken with a Newsmax TV interviewer 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.

It asked Flynn for all documents and depositions related to these matters.

Miller was in touch with Trump on Jan. 6 at least twice, according to reporting by The Post, helping him draft a statement that evening. He was the spokesman for Trump during several key periods: before Nov. 3, through much of the transition, and then again after Jan. 6, during the impeachment.

Miller was also in touch with Giuliani and others in the war room about their efforts in the days leading up to Jan. 6, according to Post reporting. But he was not at the White House on the day of the attack, people familiar with the matter said.

When Trump issued a false statement saying Pence had the authority to block certification and claiming Pence agreed with Trump’s position, Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, called Miller to raise objections to the statement.

Miller also drafted tweets and shared them with the White House — that the president did not send — urging his supporters to leave the Capitol on the afternoon of Jan. 6, The Post has reported. Miller was also involved in devising a poll that was designed to show Republican lawmakers they would face political repercussions if they voted to impeach Trump, and the poll was circulated.

Stepien, once an aide to former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (R) and part of the 2016 Trump campaign, served as White House political director and then joined the 2020 campaign before being named campaign manager. A data guru, he had privately told others for months that Trump had difficult odds of winning.

Flynn, Stepien and Miller did not immediately respond to messages from The Post.

Also on the list is McCallum, a national executive assistant to Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign who “reportedly participated in efforts to spread false information about alleged voter fraud in the November 2020 election and to encourage state legislatures to alter the outcome of the November 2020 election,” according to the transmittal of the subpoena issued by the committee.

“Specifically, there<a href="https://mirsnews.podbean.com/e/call-to-legislator-from-someone-claiming-to-be-with-trump-campaign-12120/" title="mirsnews.podbean.com"> is a publicly available recording of a voice mail</a> that Ms. McCallum reportedly left for an unknown Michigan state representative,” wrote Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee’s chairman. “In the recording, Ms. McCallum wanted to know whether the Trump campaign could ‘count on’ the representative and said that the individual had the authority to appoint an alternate slate of electors based on purported evidence of widespread election fraud.”

The committee requested that McCallum provide documents by Nov. 23 and appear for a deposition on Nov. 20.

The committee has already sought information from Bannon, who was the lead political strategist for the Willard operation. In seeking to compel testimony from Bannon, the congressional panel investigating Jan. 6 cited his reported presence at the “ ‘war room’ organized at the Willard.” The former White House adviser has refused to cooperate with the panel, citing Trump’s invocation of executive privilege.

In response to his defiance, the House voted last month to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress and referred the matter to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution.


<p>
<email>jacqueline.alemany@washpost.com</email>
</p>



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<email>josh.dawsey@washpost.com</email>
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Harvard University, BA IN Government

Jacqueline Alemany is a Congressional Investigations reporter for The Washington Post. Previously, she was the author of The Early 202, The Post's flagship early morning newsletter featuring news critical to the nation’s many power centers. Alemany is also an on-air contributor to NBC News and MSNBC.

Jacqueline Alemany

Pulitzer Prize for work with a team of Washington Post reporters on Trump campaign and administration ties to Russia

Goldsmith Award for Investigative Reporting, finalist, for work with Washington Post team on Trump-Russia connections, 20187

John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, Columbia University, for work with Alan Miller, 2006

Golden Typewriter Award, New York Press Club, for series on campaign donors called "The Investors," for work with team from Wall Street Journal, 2002

National Press Club Consumer Journalism Prize for series on health-care legislation, 2000 

White House Correspondents Association, Raymond Clapper Memorial Award, for series on conflicts of interest in the federal courts with Star Tribune reporter Sharon Schmickle, 1996

Goldsmith Award for Investigative Reporting, finalist, for work with Sharon Schmickle on conflicts of interest on the federal bench, 1996

Pulitzer Prize, finalist, for work with Sharon Schmickle on conflicts of interest on the federal bench, 1996

George Polk award for work with Washington Post reporters on Trump connections to Russia, 2018

One Party Country: The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century

Investigative Reporting, Advanced Methods and Techniques, anthology edited by John Ullmann

Oberlin College, BA in Government and History, 1974

Stanford University, John S. Knight Fellowship, one year non-degree program

Tom Hamburger is an investigative reporter on the national desk of The Washington Post. He has covered the White House, Congress and regulatory agencies, with a focus on money and politics. 

Tom Hamburger

White House Correspondents Award for Deadline Reporting

University of South Carolina

Josh Dawsey is a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the paper in 2017 and previously covered the White House. Before that, he covered the White House for Politico, and New York City Hall and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the Wall Street Journal.