The Mar-a-Lago search piqued interest on and off the Hill about whether DOJ’s two clearest investigative threads — Trump’s improper storage of government documents and his attempts to overturn the election — could ultimately join. And select panel lawmakers are curious if any of the documents seized from Trump’s estate relate to their probe.
“The explosion of interest in what happened at Mar-a-Lago took everybody on our committee by surprise. We didn’t know anything about it,” said select panel member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.). “If there are documents there that are relevant to Jan. 6, obviously we’d be interested.”
And DOJ has recently illustrated the stark contrast between their powers and the more limited ones of the committee — not just via the FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, but through the recent torrent of subpoenas and search warrants targeting dozens of Trump’s highest-profile allies connected to the Jan. 6 grand jury investigation.
DOJ has seized the phones of several Trump allies who wouldn’t fully cooperate with the panel, including John Eastman, the attorney who helped design Trump’s last-ditch bid to subvert the election; Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who spearheaded efforts to replace department leadership with officials who would bend to Trump’s demands; and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who has bankrolled and promoted a wide range of discredited efforts to reverse the election results.
Eastman, Perry and Lindell had all managed to dodge the select committee’s efforts to obtain their phone records and requests for their testimony.
Additionally, DOJ in June raided the home of Jeffrey Clark, a former DOJ official whom Trump nearly installed atop the department to help execute his plan to remain in power. Clark had previously pleaded the Fifth to lawmakers rather than describe his involvement.
“We’ve had some defiance. We’ve taken efforts to enforce,” said panel member Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.). “That’s different from [when] you’re the prosecutor, and you plunk witnesses in front of the grand jury.”
The actions by DOJ have renewed questions about when the select committee plans to share its evidence to potentially assist prosecutors’ efforts. The panel’s 1,000-plus witness transcripts are likely to remain out of prosecutors’ hands until at least late October or early November, and committee members have emphasized they’ll probably make the full batch of transcripts public…
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