Jan. 6 committee seeks MAGA rioters' phone records to see if they were talking with government officials

On Tuesday, POLITICO reported that a key aim of the House January 6 Committee's latest rounds of subpoenas for phone records of Capitol insurrectionists is to find out whether they were in communication with anybody in the government.

"The Jan. 6 select committee has begun subpoenaing phone records of some of the defendants charged with breaching the Capitol a year ago, hoping to suss out if any of them were talking to government officials beforehand," reported Kyle Cheney. "'We’d love to know who they were talking to,' Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said Tuesday when asked about the panel’s pursuit of individual defendants, 'I mean if they were communicating with government officials or something like that.'"

Phone records would not include any voice recordings or transcripts of what was actually discussed; rather it is the metadata of the call, including who was called and for how long.

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Already, some of the organizers of the "Stop the Steal" rally that preceded the attack have sued Verizon to try to stop the release of their phone records, and some rioters have filed similar lawsuits.

This comes as the committee issues new subpoenas for six allies of former President Donald Trump, including Cleta Mitchell, who was present on the call where Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" extra votes for him, and One America News host Christina Bobb, whose metadata turned up in the proposed Trump executive order to seize voting machines.

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