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Republican lawmakers used a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing Tuesday to challenge telecommunications officials over phone records obtained in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Lawmakers pressed telecom representatives about what role their companies played in providing prosecutors with toll records tied to certain sitting members of Congress, according to the Associated Press.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, argued that the episode would have received broader attention if it had happened to Democrats. “If the shoe were on the other foot, it’d be front-page news all over the world that Republicans went after sitting Democratic senators’ phone records,” Graham said, adding, “I just want to let you know,” and then stating, “I don’t think I deserve what happened to me.”
Telecom lawyers defended their compliance, saying they provided information under subpoenas and court orders. Chris Miller, senior vice president and general counsel for Verizon’s consumer group, testified that the company “We were compelled to provide this information under the law, and we complied.” He also said, “No matter who is the target of a subpoena Verizon cannot ignore a valid legal demand or a court order,” while acknowledging that “our processes could have been better suited to meet what was a new and unique set of circumstances for us, and for other companies.”
The hearing centered on what Democrats and Republicans described as the first chance for Graham and other lawmakers to confront telecom representatives about the subpoenas’ reach. The toll records at issue, lawmakers said, showed when calls were placed and how long they lasted, without capturing the content of the conversations. Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said subpoenas were issued for phone records of 20 current or former Republican members of Congress, as part of Smith’s team’s review of contacts involving Trump and allies on Capitol Hill.
Democrats criticized the Republican framing, pointing to the violence of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, said the comparison Republicans drew was misplaced. “Let me start by rejecting the notion that the Department of Justice’s investigation into the attack on the Capitol was worse than the attack on the Capitol,” Whitehouse said.
Michael Romano, a former Justice Department prosecutor who helped oversee prosecutions of Capitol rioters, echoed that view. Romano said he was surprised by the hearing and argued that toll records collection did not raise the kind of concerns lawmakers were treating it as. “When I first first learned of this hearing, I was surprised,” Romano said, explaining that “there is nothing remotely scandalous or controversial about the collection of toll records.” He added: “I understand that some of you had your records collected and are unhappy about that, and that’s understandable. Nobody enjoys having the government collect their information. But apart from that, I’m happy to say you were not harmed.”
Romano’s comments came as the hearing also included assertions from Smith’s defense of the approach used to seek the records. The report said Smith had defended the phone records collection to lawmakers in a private deposition in December, stating that “if Donald Trump had chosen to call a number of Democratic senators, we would have gotten toll records for Democratic senators.”
Telecommunications companies said they treated the Smith subpoenas like other requests from law enforcement and emphasized the limited nature of what prosecutors sought. Miller testified that the subpoenas Verizon received “did not include any names or any other information identifying these numbers as belonging” to members of Congress, and he said a non-disclosure order from a judge barred the company from alerting the targeted lawmakers.
A T-Mobile representative told the subcommittee that the subpoenas the company fielded did not seek records from Senate business lines. Separately, David McAtee, senior executive vice president and general counsel for AT&T, said two subpoenas in January 2023 sought records about a personal account belonging to a sitting member of Congress; McAtee said the subpoenas listed only a phone number and did not indicate the requested information involved lawmakers. McAtee also said the records were produced without the company knowing that the associated names were sitting members of Congress.
McAtee said AT&T’s legal team also responded to a subpoena from prosecutors by seeking information from Smith’s team about how a legal protection afforded to lawmakers—known as the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause—might apply. He said “The special counsel’s office never responded to that email — at least not substantively — and ultimately the office abandoned the subpoena and no records were produced.”
For their part, Miller and McAtee said their companies were making process changes going forward. Miller said Verizon instituted “a series of changes,” including ensuring that senior company leadership is notified before information about members of Congress is disclosed. He also said the company would notify a lawmaker when possible that their information was being sought and would challenge any non-disclosure order that prevented it from doing so, according to the hearing testimony described by AP.