Link. Subheadline:
Prosecutors who are questioning witnesses before a grand jury - including two top aides to Vice President Mike Pence - have asked in recent days about conversations with Trump, his lawyers and others in his inner circle, according to two people familiar with the matter.
This item is saying apart from Congressional hearings being broadcast on TV, and apart from generic questions of whether Trump or others broke laws; a grand jury is empaneled and hearing testimony with the possibility that indictments will issue.
The item states from the start:
The Justice Department is investigating President Donald Trump's actions as part of its criminal probe of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to four people familiar with the matter.
Prosecutors who are questioning witnesses before a grand jury - including two top aides to Vice President Mike Pence - have asked in recent days about conversations with Trump, his lawyers and others in his inner circle who sought to substitute Trump allies for certified electors from some states Joe Biden won, according to two people familiar with the matter. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
The prosecutors have asked hours of detailed questions about meetings Trump led in December 2020 and January 2021; his pressure campaign on Pence to overturn the election; and what instructions Trump gave his lawyers and advisers about fake electors and sending electors back to the states, the people said. Some of the questions focused directly on the extent of Trump's involvement in the fake-elector effort led by his outside lawyers, including John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, these people said.
In addition, Justice Department investigators in April received phone records of key officials and aides in the Trump administration, including his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, according to two people familiar with the matter. That effort is another indicator of how expansive the Jan. 6 probe had become, well before the high-profile, televised House hearings in June and July on the subject.
The Washington Post and other news organizations have previously written that the Justice Department is examining the conduct of Eastman, Giuliani and others in Trump's orbit. But the degree of prosecutors' interest in Trump's actions has not been previously reported, nor has the review of senior Trump aides' phone records.
A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Justice Department spokesman and a lawyer for Meadows both declined to comment.
The revelations raise the stakes of an already politically fraught probe involving a former president, still central to his party's fortunes, who has survived previous investigations and two impeachments. Long before the Jan. 6 investigation, Trump spent years railing against the Justice Department and the FBI; the investigation moving closer to him will probably intensify that antagonism.
Federal criminal investigations are by design opaque, and probes involving political figures are among the most closely held secrets at the Justice Department. Many end without criminal charges. The lack of observable investigative activity involving Trump and his White House for more than a year after the Jan. 6 attack has fueled criticism, particularly from the left, that the Justice Department is not pursuing the case aggressively enough.
In trying to understand how and why Trump partisans and lawyers sought to change the outcome of the election, one person familiar with the probe said, investigators also want to understand, at a minimum, what Trump told his lawyers and senior officials to do. Any investigation surrounding the effort to undo the results of the election must navigate complex issues of First Amendment-protected political activity and when or whether a person's speech could become part of an alleged conspiracy in support of a coup.
Many elements of the sprawling Jan. 6 criminal investigation have remained under wraps. But in recent weeks the public pace of the work has increased, with a fresh round of subpoenas, search warrants and interviews. Pence's former chief of staff, Marc Short, and lawyer, Greg Jacob, appeared before the grand jury in downtown Washington in recent days, according to the people familiar with the investigation.
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[italics added] Anonymous sourcing, with it key to mention of number of persons, undisclosed press sources stating whatever, all that is part of ones who anonymously talk about closed door grand jury activity.
With a grand jury, there is only one lawyer, a prosecutor, presenting evidence to a citizen panel, as and how the prosecutor chooses, with the grand jury to ultimately indict or not. Elsewhere there has been writing about the situation of a sole prosecutor in secret managing a grand jury proceeding, including:
As New York Judge Sol Wachtler said in 1985, “If a district attorney wanted, a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.”
Grand juries are the prosecutor’s babies. They decide who gets picked, what evidence gets presented, and what gets left out. There’s no judge, no defense attorney, and generally a defendant only testifies in rare circumstances — his story is so air tight that there’s no down side in putting him in. There’s no necessity for unanimity among the 23 or so jurors, and the standard of proof is so low — that probable cause exists to believe a crime has been committed — anyone, for the merest hint of an offense, can get indicted.
Of course a grand jury can be manipulated the other way - to a non-indictment result equivalent to an acquittal without a trial, depending on presecutorial discretion, in secret, behind closed doors. Wikipedia posting on the Michael Brown shooting death which happened a few years back in Ferguson, MO; white cop shoots black man; extensive protest activity resulting:
A grand jury was called and given extensive evidence from Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County Prosecutor. On November 24, 2014, McCulloch announced the St. Louis County grand jury had decided not to indict Wilson.[11] In March 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice reported the conclusion of its own investigation and cleared Wilson of civil rights violations in the shooting. It found forensic evidence supported Wilson's account, and that witnesses who corroborated the officer's account were credible. Witnesses who had incriminated him were found to be not credible, with some admitting they had not directly seen the events.[12][13] The U.S. Department of Justice concluded that Wilson shot Brown in self-defense.[14][15]
A new St. Louis prosecutor, Wesley Bell, spent five months in 2020 reviewing the case with an eye to charging Wilson with either manslaughter or murder. In July, Bell announced he would not charge Wilson with any crime.[16]
You and I will never know how a grand jury is handled ["manipulated" being an alternative word] unless we are picked to sit on one. No broadcast. No public transcript. Witnesses and the jurors sworn to secrecy about what they experienced behind the closed doors, witness attorneys barred. All that, but the rationale is it is a preliminary inquiry of whether a crime should or should not be charged, and it can save an accused the cost of an adversarial trial, if no indictment issues. It dates to English law, protections against authority of the King, via right among the peerage to a grand jury and a jury trial each being with a panel of one's peers deciding, factually, what happened and was it criminal. Making it harder for the King to stack the court. What it is now is what it is.
BOTTOM LINE: Do not misunderstand. That a grand jury is sitting and listening is a major step beyond the FBI doing a field investigation. Subpoena power exists, compelling witness attendance, even should a witness invoke Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination as questions from the prosecutor are posed.
This step means the gears are seriously moving.
_________UPDATE_________
The ambiguity of the Michael Brown grand jury process remains online as it had been contemporaneously reported; PBS.