The Wards’ phone company received a subpoena in January requesting certain phone records from November 2020 to January 2021. The Wards’ lawsuit was one of several filed by people whose phone records were subpoenaed as part of the House investigation, but it is one of the first among them with such a persuasive ruling. Phone companies have largely allowed their customers whose records have been subpoenaed to block Congress from accessing them simply by suing, which many Trump allies have done. The Wards claimed in their lawsuit against the House committee that the demand for the phone records violated their constitutional rights, asking a federal court in Arizona to quash the subpoena. In a ruling on Thursday, Humetewa said she was barred by a legal concept known as sovereign immunity from taking legal action against House lawmakers as she found they were acting in their official government capacity in requesting the information. He also dismissed claims the Wards had brought against their phone company to block production of the records. The Arizona court cited a federal appeals court ruling in D.C. that upheld the committee’s Jan. 6 probe as legal when the appeals court rejected Trump’s attempt to block the release of his White House records to congressional investigators. Humetewa also wasn’t convinced the subpoena for the phone records was overly broad. “The Select Committee’s information request relates to records of phone calls from November 1, 2020 to January 31, 2021, from an account associated with a Republican candidate to serve as an elector for former President Trump,” he wrote. “This three-month period is clearly relevant to its investigation into the causes of the January 6 attack.”
