The select House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot on Tuesday issued subpoenas to Rudy Giuliani, another former lawyer for ex-President Donald Trump, and two other allies.
The subpoenas add to a raft of demands for interviews and evidence that the House panel has already issued to people in Trump’s orbit, a number of whom have resisted cooperating.
The committee said that the new subpoenas were aimed at four people, Giuliani, the attorneys Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell, and Trump associate Boris Epshteyn, “who publicly promoted unsupported claims about the 2020 election and participated in attempts to disrupt or delay the certification of election results.”
The Jan. 6, 2021, invasion of the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters was the culmination of his claim that he had actually won the election.
The former New York mayor Giuliani had led efforts for Trump after the election to challenge results in individual states that showed President Joe Biden had won. Giuliani’s law license was suspended in New York and Washington, D.C., for what a disciplinary panel in New York called his “false and misleading statements” about the election results.
Ellis assisted Giuliani in that effort, and “reportedly prepared and circulated two memos purporting to analyze the constitutional authority for the Vice President [Mike Pence] to reject or delay counting electoral votes from states that had submitted alternate slates of electors,” the committee said in a press release.
Powell, “actively promoted claims of election fraud on behalf of former President Trump in litigation and public appearances,” the committee said.
Sidney Powell, an attorney later disavowed by the Trump campaign, participates in a news conference with U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani at the Republican National Committee headquarters on Capitol Hill in Washington, November 19, 2020.
And Epshteyn “reportedly attended meetings at the Willard Hotel in the days leading up to January 6th and had a call with former President Trump on the morning of January 6th to discuss options to delay the certification of election results in the event of Vice President Pence’s unwillingness to deny or delay the certification.”
Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss, said, “The four individuals we’ve subpoenaed today advanced unsupported theories about election fraud, pushed efforts to overturn the election results, or were in direct contact with the former President about attempts to stop the counting of electoral votes.”
“We expect these individuals to join the nearly 400 witnesses who have spoken with the Select Committee as the committee works to get answers for the American people about the violent attack on our democracy,” Thompson said.
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