As the Justice Department investigates former President Donald Trump, three key figures have emerged with connections to both investigations that could lead to the prosecution of Trump.
Alex Cannon, Christina Bobb, and Kash Patel have each played a role in two separate investigations led by special counsel Jack Smith: one focusing on the mishandling of classified documents found at Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago and another focusing on Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election that led to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
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All three figures’ testimonies could prove invaluable for Smith, who has ramped up his investigations in recent weeks by subpoenaing former Vice President Mike Pence and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. He has also received more documents from Mar-a-Lago.
“Typically, you don’t have two separate investigations and two separate sets of possible crimes to work with as you’re negotiating. Smith does have that here,” Norm Eisen, a counsel for Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment, told the Hill. “For him, it’s like a two-for-one sale. If he cuts a cooperation deal with some of these individuals, he can advance multiple cases at the same time.”
Alex Cannon
Alex Cannon, who served as an attorney and White House aide for Trump, was initially hired to work on contracts for the Trump Organization. He testified before the House Jan. 6 committee that he was hesitant about being pulled into working on fraud issues for the campaign.
“I believe that the only reason I was asked to do this is because others didn’t want to. I have no particular experience with election law or anything. I do vendor contracts,” he told the committee.
Cannon was tasked with evaluating claims from “crazy people” and claims that dead people may have voted — something he told the committee that he was unable to verify due to voter database limitations.
“I was not personally finding anything sufficient to alter the results of the election,” Cannon said during his testimony, comments that he also relayed to Pence, who refused to delay the vote certification that affirmed Joe Biden as president.
Last February, Cannon refused to sign a statement that indicated all classified materials were returned to the National Archives and Records Administration, saying that he was not sure that was accurate, per the Washington Post. His judgment turned out to be true, as over 1,000 more documents, hundreds marked classified, were discovered months later at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, 2022, during an FBI search of the home.
Christina Bobb
Christina Bobb, a lawyer for Trump’s 2024 campaign, also worked during Trump’s 2020 campaign post-election lawsuits alleging voter fraud in his attempt to overturn the election.
Bobb took the opposite approach of Cannon during the Mar-a-Lago classified documents controversy. In June, she signed a letter attesting that all classified documents, to the best of her ability, were handed over to the government.
Justice Department officials turned their heads to Bobb after the FBI raid, saying that the discovery of sensitive material “cast serious doubt” on her sworn statement. She later met with federal investigators in October and stood before a federal grand jury in January after being subpoenaed by Smith.
In 2020, Bobb was a reporter with One America News Network and a Trump campaign volunteer. In her interview before the Jan. 6 committee, Bobb testified that she believed there was suspicious activity on Election Day in 2020 that merited review.
“I volunteered, and I wanted to look into it because I was concerned about the integrity of my vote, of the country. I think that’s why we all got involved,” Bobb said during her testimony. “So I don’t want you to take my statement and say, ‘Christina Bobb said that in the beginning the legal team knew there was no fraud.’ That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying there was plenty of reason to believe there could be fraud.”
Bobb was also present during Trump’s infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — the focal point of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s investigation in which the special grand jury recently found evidence that at least one witness might have committed perjury.
Kash Patel
Kash Patel began his work in the Trump sphere in 2020 as chief of staff to then-Defense Secretary Christopher Miller. Later, Trump appointed him as a representative to the National Archives upon leaving office. He remains a Trump loyalist and works on the board of Trump’s social media enterprise.
Patel testified before the Jan. 6 committee but failed to recall details regarding certain conversations with Trump, as well as reported plans that the former president was, around the time of the Jan. 6 riot, going to install him as the head of the CIA. Patel adamantly denied the claims.
He sidestepped questions relating to actions Trump should have taken to quell the riots but instead offered testimony regarding his and the Pentagon’s work to secure assistance from the National Guard and deployment of as many as 20,000 troops, the Hill reported.
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In the investigation regarding the documents found at Mar-a-Lago, Patel repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment rights during his first appearance before a grand jury. He later was granted immunity by a judge and compelled to answer questions in the documents case.
“The White House counsel failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings, but that doesn’t mean the information wasn’t declassified,” Patel said in an interview with Breitbart in May 2022. “I was there with President Trump when he said, ‘We are declassifying this information.’”
