The Department of Justice Just Upped the Ante on Trumpworld

Photo by Jason Andrew, NYT

It turns out Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), an extreme MAGA House Republican, wasn’t that far off the mark last week when she warned that “35 people from President Trump’s MAGA circle, the inner circle, his biggest allies were raided by the FBI. And I’ve been talking to some of them myself today and it’s terrifying.” This echoed Steve Bannon’s similar declaration about a “raid” on 35 Trump allies on September 9, 2022 when he was a guest on The Charlie Kirk Show.

The New York Times and other news outlets have since confirmed that not 35 but 40 subpoenas were issued last week by the grand jury in D.C. to Trump allies around the country. That body is investigating the organization and funding behind the January 6 coup attempt and insurrection at the Capitol. While these aren’t “raids” as Greene and Bannon have breathlessly described them, they are a serious escalation of the investigation. The subpoenas include one served on Dan Scavino, who earlier fought off a subpoena from the January 6 Committee and so far has escaped federal charges for contempt of Congress, and one served on Bernie Kerik, who is a close associate of Rudy Giuliani.

Alongside the news of the subpoenas, the Times reported that federal investigators had seized the cellphones of high level Trump aides Mike Roman and Boris Epshteyn, adding them to the list of Trump associates whose phones have been taken by federal authorities.

That’s quite a cast of characters, so let’s review who these four players are and what information they might have that the grand jury and federal investigators want.

Dan Scavino

Trump had plucked Scavino from obscurity as a staff member at a Trump golf course and ultimately promoted him to run his social media as deputy chief of staff for communications at the White House. Scavino helped draft Trump’s tweets both before and after the 2020 election, spreading misinformation about the election results and helping to fuel attendance at Trump’s January 6 rally (“Will be wild!”)

The January 6 Committee has had little luck getting Scavino before it. It issued a subpoena to him last fall, citing reports that he may have had advance knowledge of the likelihood of violence at the Capitol. It also believed that he was physically with Trump on January 5 and was privy to a discussion about how to convince Republican Congressmembers not to certify the election for Biden. Scavino was also allegedly with Trump on January 6 when the former president was tweeting about Mike Pence being a coward while refusing repeatedly to put out any tweets to quell the attack. Trump finally and reluctantly taped a message, after several failed takes, for his followers to go home, which Scavino presumably helped shape and post on social media.

Scavino delayed and made excuses several times for not appearing before the Committee, and Congress finally voted to hold him in contempt. For unknown reasons, the Justice Department declined to prosecute both Scavino and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, but it could be because both Scavino and Meadows, as top administration employees who were advising the former president daily, had far stronger claims of executive privilege than Steve Bannon or Peter Navarro, who ultimately were charged with and prosecuted for contempt. Those executive privilege claims might have been very difficult to overcome before a federal court, and the Justice Department may have been reluctant to pierce the privilege in this instance and thus open future administrations up to a similar tactic from a Republican controlled Congress.

But a grand jury subpoena will be much harder to thwart than a Congressional one. Scavino may have to either produce documents and say what he knows under oath or plead the Fifth and refuse to testify. Should he elect to remain silent, however, it’s still possible that prosecutors could grant Scavino immunity, which would force him to testify about what he knows.

For now, Scavino is still on Trump’s payroll and is considered a MAGA loyalist.

Bernie Kerik

Kerik is a disgraced former NYC police commissioner who rode Giuliani’s coattails to the spotlight during and after 9/11 but then was convicted of tax fraud and making false statements to authorities, for which he was sentenced to four years in prison, per a profile in The New York Times. Kerik stayed close with Giuliani and, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, worked to find evidence of voter fraud that Trump and his allies insisted had occurred. None was ever found.

Kerik was also part of the pro-Trump “war room” team assembled at the Willard Hotel in the days leading up to and including January 6, 2021. He was briefly famous for complaining that he had been stuck with the bill for the hotel and for travel expenses that he had fronted while searching for the elusive evidence of election fraud. Kerik had been denied a Trump campaign credit card, and the unreimbursed bills were piling up—a common feature in Trumpworld. “How do I know I’m gonna get my money back?” Kerik recounted in an interview with The Washington Post. (It took Fox News personality Jeannine Pirro going to bat for Kerik for him to get his bills paid, which had racked up as high as $225,000.)

Kerik ultimately received a pardon from Trump for the earlier fraud and obstruction related convictions just before Trump left office. Kerik previously appeared voluntarily before the January 6 Committee and testified for eight hours, though it’s not clear what information he revealed.

Mike Roman

Roman’s name hasn’t surfaced much during the course of the investigations and hearings, but his role was fairly central in the Trump Campaign. He was a strategist who was named the campaign’s director of Election Day operations. He also has been linked to the Trump White House’s efforts to coordinate fake elector slates as part of the larger plan to reverse or delay the outcome of the election when Congress convened on January 6, 2021.

Before joining the White House, Roman worked for the Koch Brothers as head of research for the “Freedom Partners” where his job was to track the activities of Democratic political organizers and donors. That 25-person intelligence-gathering unit was officially disbanded in 2016, after which Roman was hired by the Trump campaign to oversee poll-watching in the final weeks before the 2016 election. He then quietly joined the White House where he reported to White House counsel Don McGahn.

According to Politico, “election monitoring, concerns about voter fraud and Election Day poll monitoring have long been a passion of Roman’s and the primary focus of his blog, with entries dating as far back as 2008.” This passion appears to have dovetailed with his role in the Trump campaign. “If an election is worth winning, then there is someone willing to steal it,” Roman wrote in one introductory post, unintentionally foreshadowing his activity for Trump.

The January 6 Committee subpoenaed Roman back in February, but there have been no public reports about his testimony. Still, there are important stories that swirl around him. Of particular note is his role on January 6 itself. Roman was identified as the campaign aide who attempted to deliver false lists of fake electors from Michigan and Wisconsin to Capitol Hill so that Vice President Mike Pence would have them for his counting of the ballots. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), whose chief of staff wisely declined to accept the lists from Roman, initially tried to portray Roman as a green and inexperienced intern and not the experienced operative that he is. That Roman’s phone was seized by the FBI means that a federal judge has agreed that there is probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime exists on it.

Boris Epshteyn

Also believed to be possessing evidence of criminal activity is Boris Epshteyn, a key Trump aide who has publicly acknowledged his role in the organizing of the alternate elector scheme. He admitted to CNN in an interview earlier this year, “Yes, I was part of the process to make sure there were alternate electors for when, as we hoped, the challenges to the seated electors would be heard, and would be successful.” Epshteyn publicly maintained, however, that these were not “fraudulent” electors but rather were simply “alternates” and that everything he did was legal and by the book.

Private emails between Epshteyn and campaign organizers in the swing states undercut this claim, however. As reported by The New York Times, a lawyer had written to Epshteyn seeking clarity on the scheme. “We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” wrote Jack Wilenchik in a Dec. 8, 2020 email to Epshteyn. In a follow-up email, Wilenchik wrote that “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes,” adding a smiley face emoji.

Per the Times, many of the emails around the elector scheme went through Epshteyn, who acted as a coordinator for people inside and outside the Trump campaign. Epshteyn tellingly did not share these emails with the White House counsel’s office, which already had determined that the plan was not legally sound.

Epshteyn was also a regular point of contact for lawyer John Eastman, passing along his infamous coup memo to Giuliani and working to arrange for Eastman’s costs of travel and logistics around his trip to the White House on January 4, when Trump and Eastman tried to pressure Mike Pence to execute on the plan. (A federal judge has already ruled that this meeting was evidence that Eastman and Trump likely broke two federal laws, vitiating any claim of attorney-client privilege over their communications.)

The sweeping subpoenas served upon over three dozen Trump aides (occuring just over 60 days before the midterms), along with the seizure of Roman’s and Epshteyn’s phones, understandably has Trumpworld very concerned. It also demonstrates that the Department of Justice is still moving ahead aggressively and methodically. For critics of Attorney General Merrick Garland, there is certainly no evidence now to support the idea that the Department’s investigation has stalled out; to the contrary, it appears to be revving up considerably.