The Justice Department is pulling out all the stops and ramping up its probe of former President Donald Trump’s role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, say sources familiar with the matter.

Special counsel Jack Smith, who is also handling the prosecution of the former president in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, is intensifying his focus on the failed insurrection.

According to a report from The Washington Post, the probe is speeding forward on “multiple tracks” and paying special attention to ads and fundraising pitches that claimed election fraud as well as plans for “fake electors.”

One particular group of attorneys has been placed under the microscope for specifically attempting to persuade state, local, federal, and judicial authorities that President Joe Biden’s win wasn’t legitimate. The DOJ is seeking to discern whether attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Kurt Olsen, Kenneth Chesebro, and now-former Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark were following orders from Trump and just exactly what those orders were.

And people in Trump’s universe have alleged that preparing alternate electors does not qualify as criminal conduct, per the Post.

In the wake of the 2020 election, one advertising firm created three spots for the former president’s fundraising, titled, “Stop the Steal,” “Overwhelming,” and “On Tape,” the Post reports. But when Trump campaign lawyers reviewed the ads, they soon grew worried about potentially false information contained within them, sources told the newspaper.

“The campaign’s own legal team and data experts cannot verify the bullshit being beamed down from the mothership,” Trump advisor Jason Miller wrote in an email to Larry Weitzner, an executive at the firm producing Trump’s campaign ads at the time.

Miller also wrote that Trump’s legal team was “0 for 32,” a likely reference to the number of times the attorneys attempted and failed when challenging the results in court.

The correspondence between Miller and Weitzner is one of several bits of evidence that prosecutors have produced to show that MAGA allies understood the dubious nature of Trump’s claims. As a result, Smith’s team has issued subpoenas in connection to the ads in a further endeavor to gather more information.

And for New York University Law Professor Ryan Goodman, Miller’s email to Weitzner contains “evidence of wire fraud.”

Evidence of wire fraud, 18 USC § 1343

Trump Campaign’s Jason Miller email to Larry Weitzner, executive at firm producing the ads:

“The campaign’s own legal team and data experts cannot verify the bullshit being beamed down from the mothership.”https://t.co/yTd91KEtZr

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) June 27, 2023

As usual, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung is dissing the dissemination of “out-of-context information to the press.”

“Further, the DOJ has no place inserting itself into reviewing campaign communications and their meddling in such matters represents a grave danger to the First Amendment and should seriously concern all campaigns and Americans,” Cheung told the Post. “This is the continuation of the many witch-hunts against President Trump in order to meddle and influence the 2024 election in order to prevent him from returning to the White House. They will fail.”

And Smith’s team will also be interviewing Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Wednesday. Trump placed a phone call to Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, asking him to “find 11,780 votes.”

In a tweet, longtime Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe wrote that Raffensperger’s sit-down with the DOJ “tells me Smith is likely to ask a grand jury to indict the whole criminal gang that conspired to overturn the presidential election and overthrow the government.”

“That includes Trump at the wheel’s center and his corrupt fellow seditionists and insurrectionists as its spokes,” he concluded.

This tells me Smith is likely to ask a grand jury to indict the whole criminal gang that conspired to overturn the presidential election and overthrow the government. That includes Trump at the wheel’s center and his corrupt fellow seditionists and insurrectionists as its spokes: https://t.co/0OJSTcYTbr

— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) June 27, 2023

I am more hopeful about this than I’ve been for a while. I hope Smith and his team find out as much as they can about how one self-absorbed, evil man and his cronies nearly upended an entire country. Because if Trump gets away with this it sets a dangerous precedent that may see more fanatical attempts to overthrow the government.

Really, we can’t afford for Smith to lose.