The Trump administration official who helped craft the former president’s inflammatory Jan. 6 speech, and a duo of advisers who facilitated the rally at the Ellipse, have been subpoenaed by investigators probing last year’s insurrection at the Capitol. 

Select Jan. 6 committee chairman Bennie Thompson announced the subpoenas for Andy Surabian, Arthur Schwartz, and Ross Worthington on Tuesday. Surabian and Schwartz have “relevant information” about who was communicating with former President Donald Trump about the rally, Thompson said, and Worthington could have greater insights into Trump’s thinking since he helped draft the speech that was rife with bogus election fraud claims.

Interviews and evidence already obtained from over 300 cooperating witnesses thus far have led investigators to Surabian, Schwartz, and Worthington. 

Correspondence reviewed by the committee prompted Thompson to tell Surabian and Schwartz that the panel believes the men discussed the Jan. 6 rally directly with Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle. Those discussions may have also included rally organizers Katrina Pierson and Caroline Wren, as well as Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich, and prominent Trump campaign donor and Publix grocery store heiress Julie Fancelli. 

“The communications of interest relate to, among other issues, plans for the rally including concerns around proposed speakers like Ali Alexander (also known as Ali Akbar) and Alex Jones, appearance fees for certain people who did speak at the rally, and media coverage after Jan. 6 about the rally,” the notice to Surabian states. 

Surabian, a strategist for the GOP, has close professional ties to Trump Jr. as well as ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Bannon is now awaiting trial after being indicted on a contempt of Congress charge late last year. 

Daniel Bean, an attorney for Surabian, issued a statement Tuesday saying the former Trump strategist would cooperate “within reason,” but insisted Surabian had “nothing at all to do with the events that took place at the Capitol that day.”

Surabian had “zero involvement in organizing the rally” and was “off the payroll of the Trump campaign as of Nov. 15, 2020.” Bean said. 

The “Stop the Steal” movement, it should be noted, began in earnest in Sep. 2020. And according to Bernie Kerik, the former New York Police Department commissioner who aided Trump’s reelection campaign and befriended Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, there were multiple meetings held in Washington with Trump administration officials long before Nov. 15.

Kerik told The Washington Post that he and Giuliani stationed themselves at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in “early November,” and moved closer to the White House in mid-December when it took up a room at The Willard Hotel. 

Surabian’s attorney said Tuesday that his client, “during the time period that the rally was being organized,” was busy overseeing a Super PAC for Republican candidates in Georgia. 

As for Schwartz, the longtime GOP operative could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday. 

Schwartz has been involved with the Trump world in varying degrees since 2015. And while he largely moves behind the scenes as a Republican fixer, he has had multiple public feuds with reporters and others in Washington while launching full-throated defenses of figures like Bannon. 

As for Worthington, the select committee wants the former Trump speechwriter to divulge any information he gleaned while he assisted the former president. In particular, it is the speech’s many claims of election fraud that Trump repeatedly and “falsely asserted,” that has piqued the committee’s interest with Worthington. 

Worthington did not return a request for comment. 

The Jan. 6 Committee probe rolls on undeterred nearly a week after the first anniversary of the deadly attack. 

Public hearings are expected sometime before spring but it has been mostly mum about its process and findings. This is a strategy, committee chair Thompson has said, that will allow for the probe to lay out all of the information at once for the public and to the best of its ability. 

Though the committee’s inner workings have been mostly private, the body did seek to publicly address some of the long-debunked theories about the Capitol attack. 

On Tuesday, for example, committee spokesman Tim Mulvey issued a statement addressing a popular right-wing conspiracy theory about Ray Epps.

Trump’s supporters—and that includes GOP members of Congress like Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas—have baselessly suggested that Epps, who was spotted in video footage from Jan. 6 urging people to march on the Capitol, was an undercover FBI agent. 

Conspiracists suggest this is proof supporting Trump’s bogus claims that Jan. 6 violence was spurred by the so-called “deep state” and not by masses of his own supporters. 

Epps, Mulvey said on Tuesday, was interviewed by the committee in November and testified that he was not an FBI informant nor was he working for any other law enforcement agency when he was seen in the video. 

“The Select Committee is aware of unsupported claims that Ray Epps was an F.B.I. informant based on the fact that he was on the F.B.I. wanted list and then was removed from that list without being charged,” Mulvey said Tuesday. “The Select Committee has interviewed Mr. Epps. Mr. Epps informed us that he was not employed by, working with, or acting at the direction of any law enforcement agency on Jan. 5 or 6 or at any other time and that he has never been an informant for the F.B.I. or any other law enforcement agency.”

According to The New York Times, Epps is the former leader of an Oath Keepers chapter in Arizona.