The FBI seized Nevada Republican Party chair Michael McDonald’s phone on Wednesday after executing a search warrant as part of the federal investigation into ex-President Donald Trump’s fake elector scheme, according to local news outlet 8 News Now.
McDonald was on the slate of so-called “alternate electors” that Trump planned on using in his plot to steal the 2020 election by having Joe Biden’s electors thrown out and replacing them with his fake ones.
The FBI also issued a search warrant on Wednesday for another top Nevada GOP official who served as a sham Trump elector: state party secretary James DeGraffenreid. However, agents reportedly couldn’t find him.
McDonald and DeGraffenreid have already been subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 Committee.
The FBI’s seizure of McDonald’s phone on Wednesday happened on the same day the Justice Department issued at least four other grand jury subpoenas — reportedly an expansion of the scope of its fake elector investigation, according to the Washington Post and the New York Times.
The subpoenas were reportedly issued to people who agreed to participate in Trump’s bogus elector plot. Two of them went to fake electors: Georgia GOP chair David Shafer and a Georgia lawyer named Brad Carver who’s also a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association.
The other two subpoenas reportedly went to Thomas Lane, a Trump campaign official who worked in Arizona and New Mexico, and Shawn Flynn, a Trump campaign official in Michigan.
The timing of the search warrant for McDonald’s phone and the subpoenas coincides with the FBI telling the Post that agents had, in the Post’s words, “conducted court-authorized law enforcement activity Wednesday morning at different locations.”
