Among the most surprising elements of the Justice Department’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack came to public light last August. Republican Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chair of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, announced that three FBI agents approached him while he was traveling with his family, and one agent “seized” his cell phone.
As we discussed at the time, it’s not at all common for federal lawmakers to approach a sitting member of Congress as part of an apparent law enforcement operation. It’s even less common for the FBI to take a lawmaker’s phone.
In the six months that followed, the GOP congressman waged a lengthy fight to prevent law enforcement officials from accessing and using the contents of cell phone. As Politico reported, Perry’s efforts haven’t gone especially well.
The chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, D.C., secretly rejected Rep. Scott Perry’s bid to shield more than 2,000 messages relevant to Justice Department investigators probing efforts by Donald Trump to subvert the 2020 election, according to newly unsealed court filings. U.S. District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell unsealed her extraordinary Dec. 28 decision on Friday evening, determining that the “powerful public interest” in seeing the previously secret opinion outweighed the need for continued secrecy.
At issue are 2,219 documents, which the Republican hoped to keep from investigators, arguing that they were shielded as part of the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause (which keeps coming up in a variety of contexts), including his private interactions with the White House.
The judge in the case didn’t buy it: Howell allowed Perry to withhold 161 of the items, but she also ordered him to disclose the rest to the Justice Department, including his 960 interactions with the Trump administration, concluding that his lawyers’ “astonishing“ argument would elevate members of Congress above the law.
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