Federal Authorities Search Home of Trump Justice Dept. Official - The New York Times

Federal investigators carried out a pre-dawn search on Wednesday at the home of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, in connection with the department’s sprawling criminal inquiry into efforts to overturn the 2020 election, people familiar with the matter and an associate of Mr.

Trump’s unsuccessful effort in late 2020 to strong-arm the nation’s top prosecutors into supporting his claims of election fraud, and the search suggested that the criminal investigation could be moving closer to Mr.

Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to help him reverse his election defeat.

Trump try — ultimately unsuccessfully — to pressure the department into lending credence to his baseless assertions of election fraud and pressure officials in Georgia, a key swing state, into reconsidering their certification of Joseph R.

Clark’s home was a significant step in the Justice Department’s many- tentacled inquiry into the efforts to subvert the democratic process after the 2020 election.

In the early spring, a separate strand of the investigation was revealed as grand jury subpoenas were issued seeking information on a wide cast of political organizers, White House aides and members of Congress connected in various ways to Mr.

Clark’s involvement in the inquiry was also the latest sign that the department’s investigation had nudged ever closer to Mr.

Clark in charge of the Justice Department as acting attorney general.

Clark was proposing to send a letter to state officials in Georgia falsely stating that the department had evidence that could lead Georgia to rescind its certification of Mr.

Garland has said little publicly about the criminal investigation other than that the Justice Department would follow the facts.

But he has been under pressure from some Democrats, including members of the House select committee, to hold Mr.

Trump and his allies to overturn the election: an effort to subvert the normal workings of the electoral process by creating fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states that were actually won by Mr.

In the past two days, according to several people familiar with the matter, at least nine people in four different states have received subpoenas in connection with the fake-elector investigation.

On Wednesday evening, a local news outlet in Nevada reported yet another development in the fake-elector investigation: Federal agents armed with a search warrant had seized the phone of Michael McDonald, the chairman of the Nevada Republican Party who had served as pro-Trump elector in the state.

While several state officials and Trump campaign aides have received subpoenas in the fake-elector investigation, the inquiry is primarily focused on a group of lawyers who worked closely with Mr.

The two men, the committee showed, were intimately involved in efforts to cajole state officials to throw the election to Mr.

Clark’s role in the efforts to subvert the election are arguably most closely related to the pressure campaign against state officials to create pro-Trump electors.

Clark, while serving as the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, helped to draft a letter to Gov.

Rosen was among the former Justice Department officials who testified about Mr

Clark before the House committee at its hearing on Thursday