In Trump Probe, Special Counsel Zooms In on Possible Criminal Charges

The repeat testimony, sometimes brief, by some witnesses appears to point to efforts by Mr. Smith’s team to determine whether a crime was committed and decide whether to file charges in the coming months, people familiar with the questioning said. 

A spokesman for Mr. Smith’s team didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In a social-media post on Friday, Mr. Trump said the special counsel was “harassing and threatening my people” and said he had done nothing wrong. 

Earlier this week, Dan Scavino, Mr. Trump’s former deputy chief of staff for communications, testified for eight hours before a Washington grand jury, according to a person familiar with the matter, weeks after a federal appeals court rejected Mr. Trump’s bid to block his testimony and that of other top aides. 

Former Vice President Mike Pence testified for several hours last week, with Mr. Smith in the room, a person familiar with the matter said, one day after an appeals court also dismissed Mr. Trump’s objections to that and paved the way for that high-level testimony. Mr. Smith’s presence at Mr. Pence’s testimony was earlier reported by CNN. 

Prosecutors were interested in Mr. Pence’s interactions with Mr. Trump and the former president’s advisers in the days leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the person said, adding that Mr. Pence largely reiterated the account he provided in his memoir. In the book, Mr. Pence said Mr. Trump had tried to pressure him to delay or block the certification of Joe Biden’s win, something he refused to do.

The grand-jury activity comes as other prosecutors obtained a victory in the investigation into the Jan. 6 pro-Trump riot at the Capitol, when a jury on Thursday found four leading figures of the Proud Boys, including its former chairman Enrique Tarrio, guilty of seditious conspiracy, the gravest charge brought in connection with the attack. 

Mr. Smith’s team has issued dozens of subpoenas including to those who had minor roles in Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the November 2020 election result, some of the people said, asking for grand-jury testimony from most. Several witnesses have been pressed on whether Mr. Trump’s political organization has been covering their legal bills and whether such payments affected their testimony, some of the people said. 

Other witnesses had declined to appear, citing their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, other people familiar with the requests said. 

Mr. Smith has also pushed forward on his inquiry into the handling of classified documents at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, calling back witnesses who had previously spoken to investigators, some of the people said. Those efforts resulted in a maid who had worked at the complex in Palm Beach having to fly in from abroad to testify, they said. 

Mr. Smith’s team appears to be particularly focused on the movement of boxes that contained classified material after Mr. Trump received a subpoena for the material, the people said. The FBI executed a search warrant at the Florida property last year and found hundreds of additional classified and other government documents. That discovery came after Mr. Trump’s legal team had already said they turned all such documents over to the Justice Department. 

A federal judge last month found Mr. Smith’s team presented convincing evidence that Mr. Trump misled his own lawyers about his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, the Journal previously reported. 

Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty to separate criminal charges he faces in Manhattan related to hush money he paid to a porn star during the 2016 campaign. A state prosecutor in Georgia has said she would announce charging decisions this summer arising from her election-interference investigation into Mr. Trump’s activities during the 2020 election.

—Alex Leary contributed to this article.

Write to Aruna Viswanatha at [email protected], Sadie Gurman at [email protected] and C. Ryan Barber at [email protected]