Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., addresses the media after the House Jan. 6 select committee hearing in Cannon Building to examine the January 2021 attack on the Capitol, on Tuesday, July 27, 2021.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
The select House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol issued subpoenas to 14 people connected to an effort to submit an alternate slate of Electoral College voters for then-President Donald Trump.
The committee said Friday it wants information from people who met and submitted false Electoral College certificates in seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
The committee said it has received information that groups of people met on Dec. 14, 2020, in the seven states mentioned in the subpoenas and “then submitted bogus slates of Electoral-College votes for former President Trump.”
Those people then sent the phony Electoral College certifications to Congress, which were used by multiple Trump advisors to “justify delaying or blocking the certification of the election during the Joint Session of Congress on Jan. 6th, 2021,” the committee said.
That session was violently disrupted that day by a mob of Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol complex and swarmed through the halls of Congress.
The people subpoenaed by the committee served as chairpersons or secretaries of each group of the false electors.
They are: Nancy Cottle, Chairperson, Arizona; Loraine B. Pellegrino, Secretary, Arizona; David Shafer, Chairperson, Georgia; Shawn Still, Secretary, Georgia; Kathy Berden, Chairperson, Michigan; Mayra Rodriguez, Secretary, Michigan; Jewll Powdrell, Chairperson, New Mexico; Deborah W. Maestas, Secretary, New Mexico; Michael J. McDonald, Chairperson, Nevada; James DeGraffenreid, Secretary, Nevada; Bill Bachenberg, Chairperson, Pennsylvania; Lisa Patton, Secretary, Pennsylvania; Andrew Hitt, Chairperson, Wisconsin; and Kelly Ruh, Secretary, Wisconsin.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who is chairman of the panel, said, “We believe the individuals we have subpoenaed today have information about how these so-called alternate electors met and who was behind that scheme.”
“We encourage them to cooperate with the Select Committee’s investigation to get answers about January 6th for the American people and help ensure nothing like that day ever happens again,” Thompson said.
The select committee has interviewed hundreds of witnesses as part of its probe.
Trump recently lost an effort in federal court to block the panel from receiving more than 700 pages of documents from his tenure in the White House.
The Supreme Court denied his request to block that transmission of records.
A spokeswoman for Trump did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment
– Additional reporting by CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger
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