Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward and her husband Michael signed a bogus electoral certificate in 2020 for former President Donald Trump. Now the select committee investigating the 45th president’s attempt to overturn the election has subpoenaed their phone records. 

First reported by Politico, the subpoena was issued to T-Mobile, the Wards provider, on Jan. 19 and called for the production of their data no later than this Friday, Feb. 4 unless the couple sued to stop the transfer. They sued on Monday. 

Investigators demanded T-Mobile share records ranging from Nov. 1, 2020 to Jan. 31, 2021 and while the subpoena will not flesh out the content of phone calls or text messages, it will detail metadata including who was called when, or for how long. 

Late last month, the Committee sent a slew of subpoenas to 14 so-called “alternate electors” for Trump, but the Wards were not on that list. Two fellow Arizonans were caught up in the probe, however: Loraine Pellegrino and Nancy Cottle.

Those women identified themselves on the phony electoral certification for Arizona as the secretary and chair, respectively, of the state’s electoral college. Neither was actually a state-certified elector, however, but rather, part of a self-styled counterfeit pro-Trump delegation. 

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In addition to the Wards T-Mobile records, the committee also demanded production from the couple’s company, Mole Medical Services. Both husband and wife are osteopaths, and in their lawsuit to stop the T-Mobile subpoena, it was their patient-physician privilege that they cited as the reason to quash the subpoena. 

“The committee has not provided any patients with notice of the subpoena and no one has even discussed a protective order that would limit the use that the committee could make of this patient information,” the Wards attorney, Alexander Kolodin, wrote in the 19-page filing. “Disclosing the phone records and metadata from the phone number would provide the [personal health information] of an unknown but quantifiable number of individuals seeking medical treatment from the plaintiffs to the committee and potentially to the public at large.” 

The Wards are not the only ones who have had phone records subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 probe. More than 100 subpoenas have been issued to various telecommunications companies asking for records to be preserved for numerous people. 

Some of those individuals have been subpoenaed by the committee individually and some have not. More recently the committee zeroed in on members of the Trump family including Eric Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancee. Though the committee has not issued a subpoena to either Eric Trump or Guilfoyle—at least not publicly—both had notable roles in the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement that piqued the probe’s interest. 

As for the phony elector scheme, it is unquestionably a key element of the probe’s inquiry. As more of the presidential records obtained from Trump’s archives trickle out, it has become increasingly clear that the former president, his lawyers, and loyalists, were entrenched in a comprehensive strategy to overturn the election and keep Trump in power. 

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported findings in two new memos, including one from Nov. 18 that proposed, formally, how to get alternate electors in place, not by the Electoral College certification deadline of Dec. 14, but instead by Jan. 6, the day Congress met to officially certify the results. 

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Another memo was sent about three weeks later, the Times reported. The memos are some of the earliest-dated documents yet that show how the Trump White House was scheming to keep the former president in power despite his defeat to Joe Biden both popularly and through the Electoral College. 

In addition to the alternate elector bid, the committee is also reportedly scrutinizing the role Trump had in proposals to seize voting machines. What has emerged in recent weeks is that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, was the leader of the bogus elector scheme and coordinated with the “alternate electors” to pull off the ruse. 

A memo dated Dec. 16, 2020, and titled “Presidential Findings to Preserve Collect and Analyze National Security Information Regarding the 2020 General Election,” went public last month and it demonstrated how the administration sought to establish context for its subversion efforts, claiming foreign interference in the 2020 race, for one, was grounds to have the U.S. military begin snatching up voting machines. 

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Unpublished strategy to Sei… by Daily Kos