The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has subpoenaed former president Donald Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and former White House adviser Stephen Miller, several news outlets reported Tuesday.
According to The Hill, “the subpoenas to Miller and McEnany focus on the false statements they made promoting baseless claims of voter fraud.”
“As a White House Press Secretary you made multiple public statements from the White House and elsewhere about purported fraud in the November 2020 election, which individuals who attacked the U.S. Capitol echoed on Jan. 6,” the committee wrote in its subpoena to McEnany, The Hill reported.
The committee appeared to peg Miller as being at the center of an effort to craft voter fraud conspiracies and Trump’s messaging ahead of the Jan. 6 rally where the then-president encouraged his supporters to “fight like hell.”
“You and your team prepared former President Trump’s remarks for the rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, you were at the White House that day, and you were with Trump when he spoke at the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally,” the committee wrote.
Yesterday, the Committee issued six subpoenas targeting some of former President Trump’s highest-ranking staff, including “Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser; William Stepien, Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign manager; Jason Miller, a senior campaign adviser; Angela McCallum, a former campaign aide; John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who reportedly advised Trump and others in the administration, and Bernard Kerik, an adviser who reportedly used Washington, D.C. hotels to serve as “command centers” for the campaign’s election strategy.
As noted by The Hill, the slew of subpoenas is likely to raise more executive privilege objections from Trump, who has already encouraged his former aides to defy the committee and refuse to testify.
Trump also sued the National Archives seeking to block the release of his presidential records to the committee, claiming it would violate his executive privilege. Last night, however, a federal judge rejected a late-night request filed by Trump to block the House committee from obtaining the documents, saying the request itself was legally “defective.”
The committee has rejected those arguments, saying only the sitting president has the authority to exert executive privilege, and President Biden has already agreed to release the records.
Read the full report on The Hill.
