WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan on Wednesday temporarily blocked enforcement of the committee’s Jan. 6 subpoena requesting the phone records of Arizona Republican Party Chairman Kelli Ward.
The ruling by Kagan, a liberal judge who handles emergency applications from Arizona, means the Supreme Court as a whole will decide how to proceed. The House committee has until Friday to respond to Ward’s request to quash the subpoena, which was filed earlier Wednesday.
The committee declined to comment on the subpoena break.
Ward’s case goes to the Supreme Court as justices weigh a separate emergency application by Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., seeking to block a subpoena demanding her testimony in a Georgia prosecutor’s investigation into allegations of interference in the 2020 election. Conservative Judge Clarence Thomas issued a similar temporary stay while the court considers what to do next.
Ward and her husband, Michael Ward, were among 14 of 84 so-called alternate voters subpoenaed to appear this year by the Jan. 6 committee, which cited their association with forged documents claiming President Donald Trump had won the election. of 2020 in their states.
Lower courts, including the San Francisco-based 9th United States Circuit Court of Appeals, rejected Ward’s arguments to block the subpoena.
The couple, who are both doctors, argued, among other things, that releasing their records would violate medical confidentiality laws. The committee is only pursuing Kelli Ward’s cases. In the Supreme Court, Ward argued that the subpoena violated his right to freedom of association under the Constitution’s First Amendment.
“If Dr. Ward’s phone and text message records are released, congressional investigators will contact everyone who contacted her during and immediately after the turmoil of the 2020 election. This is not speculation, this is certainty,” the couple’s lawyers said. written in court documents.
The subpoena relates to a T-Mobile cell phone account linked to Ward. Among the information sought is any phone numbers, IP addresses or devices that communicated with the phone in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.
Ward and his fellow Republicans had created a list of competing voters for Arizona declaring Trump won, despite election results showing Joe Biden getting more votes in the state. These actions have come under scrutiny by the Department of Justice, as well as the January 6 committee.
As part of the normal process, followed by Arizona government officials, certification of the state’s vote by a group of named voters is a formality after a winner has been determined by popular vote. Trump and his 2020 allies pursued a far-fetched theory that if states had submitted competing election results to Congress, lawmakers gathered on Capitol Hill to certify the results on Jan. 6, 2021, could have blocked Biden from becoming president.
Along with other flaws in the plan, Vice President Mike Pence, who had a ceremonial role in the certification process, refused to accept it. The attack on Capitol Hill by a pro-Trump mob was intrinsically linked to efforts to overturn Biden’s victory.
Zoe Richards contributed.
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