The House Select Committee that is in charge of figuring out what happened on January 6 when the United State Capitol was stormed by a crowd disputing the results of the 2020 presidential election, has subpoenaed Verizon for the cell phone communication records of people allegedly involved in organizing and encouraging that same crowd.
If Congress wanted to know anything more about the plaintiffs’ narrow intersection with the events it is allegedly investigating, it needed only have asked. Instead, Congress pivoted to Verizon, the telecommunications carrier for each of the Plaintiffs, to indiscriminately demand detailed information about their accounts, contacts, political associates, and locations over a three-month period that greatly exceeds the short window of time about which Congress questioned the plaintiffs.
Apart from Verizon, there are about 34 more telecommunication and social media companies subpoenaed for messaging and call records, though, so former Republican Congresswoman Barbara Comstock thinks the effort is a long shot meant to stall the investigation until an expected 2022 red House elections wave turns the tide against the Committee. “The Biden Justice Department will still be there to hold them in contempt until at least January 2025,” she added. A number of subpoenas for testifying in front of the House Select Committee on the January 6 events have already gone out with varying compliance success.
