Panel requests records of McCarthy be preserved
WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot included Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader, this week on a list of hundreds of people whose records it instructed social media and telecommunications companies to preserve for possible use in the inquiry.
The move signals that the panel may seek more information from McCarthy, who has said he had a tense phone call with Donald Trump as a mob of the former president’s supporters laid siege to the Capitol, a conversation that could shed light on Trump’s state of mind and intentions as the violence unfolded.
It also adds new context to McCarthy’s threat this week to retaliate against any company that complies with the records-preservation demand. A spokesman for McCarthy, of Bakersfield, described the development, which was reported earlier by CNN, as politically motivated.
The preservation request, which listed 11 other far-right Republicans when it was issued on Monday, was accompanied by a statement that said the committee was merely “gathering facts, not alleging wrongdoing by any individual.”
But Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the select committee, said in an interview that the demand included Republican members of Congress because the panel needed to “find out exactly what their level of participation in this event was.” He said that McCarthy’s threats were “typical of somebody who may or may not have been involved in Jan. 6 and doesn’t want that information to become public.”
McCarthy’s spokesman, Mark Bednar, criticized the inclusion of McCarthy and questioned the legitimacy of the panel.
“A serious inquiry that was not politically motivated would be looking at why the Capitol was left so unprepared and how to prevent this from happening in the future — and an authoritarian, unconstitutional attempt to rifle through individuals’ call logs will not help answer that question,” he said.
The news broke Thursday hours after the committee named Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming as its vice chairwoman, elevating the role of a Republican who has been a vocal critic of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Cheney has said that McCarthy should be called before the panel.
The committee is ramping up its investigation into the violence that engulfed the Capitol as supporters of Trump stormed the building in his name, brutalizing police officers and delaying for hours the official counting of electoral votes to formalize President Biden’s victory.
The committee sent record preservation demands this week to 35 technology companies, according to several people familiar with the documents who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Several legal experts said in interviews that the records demands did not run afoul of privacy protections. They merely instructed companies to preserve records of calls that are already kept. And the panel has not asked the companies to turn over call logs, only that they avoid destroying them in case it issues a subpoena later.