WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has asked the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to provide evidence it has gathered about former President Donald J. Trump and his allies’ plan to create false lists of pro-Trump voters in battlefield states. won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020.
Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson and the committee’s chairman, made the request known to reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, and a person familiar with the panel’s work said discussions with the Department of Justice over the false election manifesto were underway. Those talks suggest the department is sharpening its focus on that aspect of Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the election, one with a direct line to the former president.
Mr. Thompson said the committee was working with federal prosecutors to allow them to view the transcripts of interviews the panel conducted with people who served as so-called deputy voters for Mr. Trump. Mr Thompson said the Justice Department’s investigation of “fraudulent voters” was the only specific topic the agency had raised with the commission.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
The Justice Department has been negotiating with the Jan. 6 panel for weeks about turning over transcripts of its interviews to federal prosecutors. The agency has asked the committee for copies of every transcript of each of its more than 1,000 interviews, while the committee pushed back and asked the department to limit its request.
Mr Thompson’s comments on Wednesday were the clearest indication yet of what the Justice Department is looking for.
“We are negotiating how that information will be viewed,” Mr Thompson said, adding that he believed Justice Department officials would meet with the committee to personally review the transcripts. “We’re involved.”
The Justice Department has spent months investigating the plan to push fake voters forward and has issued subpoenas against top Trump attorneys who worked on the plan.
Last month, the commission tied Mr Trump directly to the plan, presenting new details about how the former president attempted to bully, flatter and bluff to invalidate his 2020 defeat in states across the country.
The committee presented evidence that Mr. Trump was trying to convince lawmakers in Biden-won battlefields to create the list of alternative voters who supported him, hoping Vice President Mike Pence would use them to undermine the normal Democratic process when he oversaw the officer of Congress. tally of the electoral votes on January 6.
The plan appears to have been set in motion just days after the election, when a pro-Trump attorney, Cleta Mitchell, emailed the idea to John Eastman, another attorney close to Trump.
Key Revelations from the January 6 Hearings
By November 18, 2020, another pro-Trump attorney, Kenneth Chesebro, had joined the effort, writing a memo suggesting that the Trump campaign should organize its allies in several swing states to compile fake voter lists. Around Thanksgiving, others signed on to the plan, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, according to a recorded statement by Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Mr. Meadows.
The Republican National Committee was eventually brought in, too, said Ronna McDaniel, the group’s chair, in a recorded statement played at a hearing last month.
Ms. McDaniel testified that Mr. Trump called her and had Mr. Eastman on the phone “to talk about the RNC’s interest in helping the campaign rally these temporary voters.”
All of this was allowed to continue, the commission said, despite several Trump campaign lawyers believing it to be illegal.
The commission has also gathered evidence about the plan from the so-called deputy voters themselves, and has issued subpoenas to more than a dozen of them. Some of those who received subpoenas, including voters from Georgia, have complied with the demands and conducted interviews with the panel.
In recent weeks, the panel learned that two people called Ms Hutchinson in what she described as an attempt to influence her testimony. Then, on Tuesday, the committee revealed that Mr. Trump had personally called a witness — though he didn’t reach the person, who notified their attorney — prompting the panel to refer the case to the Justice Department.
“It’s highly unusual,” Mr. Thompson told reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. “That’s why we have more or less put that in the hands of the Ministry of Justice.”
Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney said some Republicans had tried to dismiss the case by suggesting that Mr. Trump may have inadvertently called the witness.
“But if the former president tried to interfere with a witness, that would of course be a very serious charge,” said Mr Romney, who voted last year to convict Mr Trump on charges of inciting insurgency and removing him after the attack of January 6.
The commission’s focus on possible witness manipulation by Mr. Trump appears to be an attempt to urge the Justice Department to investigate the former president for possible crimes. At each of its recent hearings, the panel has presented evidence that members believe could be used to bolster criminal charges against Mr Trump. The commission has provided details, including about the fake voters, that could fuel charges of conspiracy to defraud the American people, falsify documents and obstruct official Congressional proceedings.
Tampering with witnesses would be yet another way to prosecute the former president. Mr. Trump has a long history of making statements or taking actions that could be read as attempts to disrupt ongoing investigations targeting him.
In April 2018, he called his former personal attorney, Michael D. Cohen, shortly after Mr. Cohen’s apartment, office and hotel room were searched by the FBI, urging him to stay strong, a person familiar with the call said.
He also made statements — publicly and on Twitter — that Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating a possible conspiracy between Mr Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, was considering possible acts of obstruction of justice. Those included posts on Twitter claiming that Mr. Cohen would never turn on him after Mr. Cohen was clearly under investigation.
Mr. Mueller’s team, which did not have the authority to indict a sitting president, ultimately did not state whether it believed Mr Trump had obstructed justice in the 11 cases it investigated, but explained them extensively. in the 448-page report it released.
Maggie Haberman† Emily Cochrane and Glenn Thrush reporting contributed.