No delay for panel to see phone records
Supreme Court denies Kelli Ward request involving Jan. 6 probe
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined a request by Kelli Ward, the head of the Arizona Republican Party, to delay the release of her cellphone records to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Ward had appealed an order from a federal judge in Phoenix that her cellphone company, T-Mobile, must turn over the logs of her phone calls and text messages to the committee. She argued that the release should be delayed until her appeals process goes through.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied that injunction. Ward then filed a request for the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.
The ruling Monday noted that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would have granted the stay and injunction of the release. Presumably, that would mean the other seven justices did not think the release of the records needed to be delayed.
The House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol asked in January for a log of Ward’s phone activity from November 2020 through January 2021.
That covered a span of time in which then-President Donald Trump worked with a team of advisers to keep the 2020 election results, which had him losing to Joe Biden, in a state of flux.
Ward, during that time, communicated with elected officials in Maricopa County who were set to canvass the election, a process that officially closes the book on the vote tally.
Ward also was part of a group of Republicans who met at party headquarters in December 2020 and signed documents falsely asserting that they represented Arizona’s votes in the Electoral College. The slate of alternate electors sent the documents to the National Archives and to Congress, where they were summarily ignored.
Ward, in court filings, has said the committee shouldn’t be able to see her phone records because she is a doctor at a medical weight loss clinic. Producing the records would violate her patients’ privacy rights, her lawyers argued in court filings.
Ward also said that producing the records would prevent Republicans from communicating with her in the future for fear their communications would result in scrutiny from federal investigators.
Neither argument swayed the courts. An attorney for the committee has argued that investigators could not wait for the appeals process to play out. The briefing schedule outlined by the 9th
Circuit court extended into 2023 and the committee was currently only empowered to meet until the next Congress is seated in January.
The committee has said, in a filing with the U.S. Supreme Court, that it needs the call records to establish “when and with what frequency she communicated with individuals known to be relevant to the Select Committee’s investigation.”
Ward invoked her Fifth Amendment right to not give testimony that could implicate her in a crime when she testified, under subpoena, before the Select Committee, according to court testimony.
Some of Ward’s communications with officials are known.
According to records, The Republic obtained from Maricopa County in 2021, Ward sent a message to Maricopa County Supervisor Clint Hickman on Nov. 13, 2020, arranging a phone call with Trump.
“Just a check in from the President of the United States,” she wrote. “So I guess that means you could/should take the call.”
Ward also sent a text to Supervisor Bill Gates the morning the board was set to approve the results, asking him not to do so.
"I know the Republican board doesn’t want to be remembered as the entity who led the charge to certify a fraudulent election,” she wrote.
Ward, according to emails obtained by the New York Times, also spoke by phone with Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and Trump attorney, in December 2020 about the plan to convene alternate electors in Arizona and several other states.
According to an email written by Kenneth Chesbro, another lawyer working for the Trump campaign, Ward had expressed concern the alternate elector plan might be “treasonous.” Ward, along with then-state Rep. Kelly Townsend, asked that there be a pending court action filed, lending plausibility to why Arizona felt the need to convene a second slate of electors.
The convening of alternate electors was part of a multi-state plan to give Vice President Mike Pence an option to delay or overturn the election results, committee testimony has revealed. With competing slates of electors, the theory went, Pence could potentially use provisions outlined in the U.S. Constitution to throw the question of who should be president to the U.S. House of Representatives.
On the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, the day a joint session of Congress set to count the Electoral College votes, Pence announced he would not go along with the plan.
His decision rippled through the crowd of Trump supporters who had left a Trump speech and were marching toward the U.S. Capitol. Video footage showed several in the crowd started a chant: “Hang Mike Pence.”