A former White House attorney who opposed the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election has received a subpoena in the Justice Department’s investigation into January 6.
Eric Herschmann was subpoenaed on Monday with an order to testify before a grand jury. He previously testified under oath to the House select committee investigation January 6.
Politico first reported news of the subpoena.
The DoJ investigation previously saw testimony from Marc Short, a top aide to former Vice President Mike Pence, and has increasingly become focused on the top levels of the Trump administration in recent months. Hundreds of Americans who participated in the attack on Congress have been indicted and some have been convicted in the investigation.
Mr Herschmann was an attorney who represented Mr Trump in his first impeachment trial and later went on to serve as an adviser in the White House, but he was never a member of the office of the White House counsel. Because of that distinction, some or all of his conversations with Mr Trump about January 6 or the efforts to overturn the election may not be privileged.
During his testimony to the January 6 committee, Mr Herschmann testified that top Trump advisers on his campaign wanted the military to seize voting machines and ripped their efforts to overturn the election as “crazy”.
The news of his subpoena broke just shortly after it was reported that Rudy Giuliani and a number of others including some state elected officials have been informed that they are targets in the Fulton County investigation into the Trump campaign’s efforts in that state to try and reverse the election results.
Mr Trump, meanwhile, is battling an entirely separate investigation now due to the allegations that he held on to classified materials at Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House.
The former president and his team have denounced all of the various criminal probes as politically motivated and have accused Democrats including Joe Biden of weaponising the Justice Department against them. Mr Biden does not have any control whatsoever over the Fulton County investigation, however, and the White House and Justice Department have both maintained that the DoJ probe is being handled completely independently from the West Wing.
