Investigators working for the Department of Justice and looking closely at phone records to determine if members of Congress communicated and coordinated with some of the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, resulting in the deaths of five people, including a Capitol police officer who was beaten to death,
CNN reports that the FBI has been especially interested in cell phone data to determine whether the insurrection might have been an inside job, at least in part:
“Law enforcement officials say one of the first steps taken after the insurrection was to seek cell phone tower data to try to identify people at the Capitol that day, a tactic allowed under existing law. That was necessary, the officials say, because among the multiple failures that day was the US Capitol Police allowing the hundreds of people who had attacked the building to leave without arrest.”
Interestingly, some Republicans were very eager to ask about cell phone metadata this week when FBI Director Christopher Wray testified on the Hill:
“FBI collection of phone metadata and geolocator data — permissible under federal law — was the subject of multiple lines of questions this week by some senators who pressed FBI Director Christopher Wray to reveal what investigators were doing with communications and financial data. Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Josh Hawley of Missouri suggested at a hearing Tuesday that the FBI could be overstepping its authority by scooping up communications data.”
Hawley, who gave a raised fist salute to the protesters just hours before the Capitol was attacked, sounded especially concerned about what the phone data might reveal:
“How are we going to know what you’re doing with it and how are we going to evaluate the bureau’s conduct if we don’t know what authorities you’re invoking, what precisely you’re doing, what you’re retaining? You’re basically saying ‘just trust us.'”
Isn’t that exactly the same thing Hawley said to the voters of Missouri? And as the world has already seen, the junior senator from the Show Me State cannot be trusted in the least.
