House Select Committee chairman Rep. Bennett Thompson said that the panel has already spoken to former attorney general William P. Barr related to its investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection.
The chairman said Sunday that the panel has already had conversations with the former attorney general as well as individuals from the Department of Defense. The situation further suggests that several former Trump administration officials have begun cooperating with the committee despite many others still fighting to compel their testimony.
House Select Committee
The committee has been issuing subpoenas and talking with various officials that worked under the Trump administration to acquire information related to the Capitol Hill siege. At the time, former United States President Donald Trump and his allies attempted to block the certification of Joe Biden's presidential win and spread claims of voter fraud in the 2020 elections.
The unprecedented incident resulted in the deaths of one police officer and four other individuals and the injury of roughly 140 members of law enforcement. While it was unclear what the committee and Barr talked about, the former attorney general has been closely tied with the former president through most of his tenure at the Department of Justice, The Washington Post reported.
The committee spoke to Barr about one possible issue regarding the recently released documents that showed the Trump administration tried to seize voting machines. The issue was discovered after officials found an unreleased executive order that the Trump administration planned to use to order the Department of Defense to investigate voter fraud.
Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, said that if a person was using the military to potentially seize voting machines, the public needed to know even if they were only discussions. The lawmaker's remarks were an answer to a question related to the draft executive order.
Barr resigned in December 2020 after working as a staunch defender of Trump during his time with the department. He worked to push the Republican businessman's agenda of "law and order." But later on, he rebuked the former president's false claims about widespread election fraud, CNN reported.
Seizing Voting Machines
Several news outlets already published the draft executive order of the Trump administration last week. The House Select Committee obtained the document after the Supreme Court rejected the former president's attempts to block the process of issuance from the National Archives.
While it remained unclear who wrote the draft executive order, it was dated Dec. 16, 2020, and would have authorized the secretary of defense to "seize, collect, retain, and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records required for retention" under a federal law that governed the retention and preservation of election records.
The committee's chairman said that the panel was unaware of whether or not there was any individual within the Pentagon who worked on seizing voting machines. However, Thompson said that the draft executive order was already "reason enough to believe that it was being proposed" by officials working under former President Trump, CBS News reported.
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