New glimpses into 2020 election interference probe suggest peril could be growing for Trump and his associates

Revelations that special counsel Jack Smith has been digging into efforts to overturn former President Donald Trump’s Arizona election loss in 2020 bolster growing indications that his investigation is nearing a critical point.

New CNN reporting on Thursday also suggests that Smith remains interested in a chaotic Oval Office meeting days before Trump left office during which the former president considered some of the wildest schemes dreamed up to try to keep him in power, despite pushback from his White House counsel.

Smith has already made Trump the first former president to be formally accused of federal crimes. Trump was charged last month with the willful retention of national defense information and over alleged obstruction of the investigation in connection with a trove of classified documents he kept at his Florida home after leaving office.

But a flurry of details about Smith’s inquiries into alleged election-stealing efforts suggest his investigators have had an industrious summer. On Wednesday evening, for instance, Rusty Bowers – the Republican former Arizona House speaker who once said it was “foreign to my very being” to submit to Trump’s bid to subvert the Constitution – said publicly for the first time on CNN that he had spoken to the FBI.

In another sign of the breadth of the investigation, CNN reported on Thursday that Smith has subpoenaed the Arizona Secretary of State’s office in connection with the effort to overturn President Joe Biden’s win in the crucial swing state. Smith’s prosecutors have also turned their attention to Georgia, where Trump asked GOP officials to help find votes to reverse another critical Biden win. In June, CNN reported that Smith had compelled at least two fake electors – who were part of a potential scheme to block the decertification of Biden’s 2020 victory – to testify to a federal grand jury…