FBI subpoenas several Republican lawmakers as DOJ probe ramps up the stakes

| 9:00 pm EDT August 10, 2022
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When the DOJ had the FBI carry out a search and seizure warrant at Mar-a-Lago as part of its investigation into the classified documents that Donald Trump stole, the question was whether the Feds would continue to keep pounding away now that they’d kicked over an ant hill. Then the FBI seized House Republican Scott Perry’s cellphone with a warrant yesterday, making clear that the DOJ was also ramping things up in its probe into Trump’s fake elector plot.

Over the past 24 hours we’ve had to put up with pundits claiming that it was probably all the DOJ would do before the election – a claim not based in any evidence or logic or actual reporting, but instead based on the premise that it’s always easy for pundits to go viral by pushing narratives that are scary and outrage-inducing, no matter how absurd.

But today the DOJ made another big move, this time by subpoenaing several unnamed Republican elected officials in Pennsylvania. This is being reported by PennLive, and though it’s credited to unnamed “sources,” the text of the article makes it fairly clear that some or all of the “sources” are the elected officials themselves. These appear to be state level legislators, whereas Scott Perry is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. But it very much appears to be part of the same probe.

Trump is known to have met with several Republicans in the Pennsylvania state legislature as part of his doomed plot to try to overthrow the 2020 election. Scott Perry reportedly played a key role as a facilitator in all of this. It’s not clear if the legislators who were subpoenaed today will be asked to testify against Perry, or Trump, or both. But it is clear that the DOJ is continuing to ramp things up at an escalating pace.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that, even with the DOJ now making the kinds of moves that tend to make their way to the media, we’re still likely only hearing about a fraction of what the DOJ is doing. For instance, just because all of the state legislators who ran to the media today about their subpoenas are in Pennsylvania, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the DOJ didn’t also subpoena state legislators today in the other states that Trump tried to overthrow. We’re still only learning about what the people on the wrong end of this investigation want us to know about, as they try to portray themselves as victims of overreach. The DOJ isn’t announcing the rest of the stuff it’s doing.