House Committee Investigating the Capitol Attack Will Seek Lawmakers' Phone Records

By Peter Wade, Rolling Stone

25 August 21

“We have quite an exhaustive list of people,” committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson said

he House select committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol will seek electronic communications records of several hundred people, including members of Congress, according to the committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.).

According to CNN, which was first to report on the committee’s planning, the notices to telecom and social media companies requesting they preserve relevant documents are set to go out as soon as next week.

Thompson, who declined to name the companies or the lawmakers, said the panel will seek records phone, text and email records belonging to “several hundred people” and that the letters would request voluntary compliance and not include subpoenas yet.

“We have quite an exhaustive list of people. I won’t give you the names (of the companies). But, you know, in terms of telecom companies, they’re the ones that pretty much you already know, maybe the networks, the social media platforms, those kinds of things,” Thompson told reporters.

“I can tell you that we’ll look at everything that will give us information on what happened on January 6th,” Thompson told CNN. “We will look at all records at some point.”

Phone records of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — who both said they spoke to Trump the day of the riot — are expected to be sought.

Jordan told CNN he’d comply with a records request, saying, “I’ve got nothing to hide. I’ve said that along, I’ve nothing to hide.”

The committee has not met since its opening hearing last month when officers who responded to the insurrection testified. According to Thompson, a decision on when the next hearing might be announced could be made “before the week’s up.”