The justice’s “administrative stay” of a subpoena for an Arizona Republican’s phone records was not an indication of how the Supreme Court would rule.
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Justice Elena Kagan ordered the committee to respond to an emergency application from Kelli Ward, the chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, by Friday.
WASHINGTON — Justice Elena Kagan on Wednesday temporarily blocked a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol for phone records of Kelli Ward, the chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party.
Justice Kagan, who oversees the appeals court that refused to block the subpoena, issued an “administrative stay” meant to preserve the status quo while the Supreme Court considers the matter. As is the court’s practice, she gave no reasons.
Justice Kagan ordered the committee to respond to Ms. Ward’s emergency application by Friday. That was an indication that the full court would rule on the matter.
Inquiries into efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election have given rise to all sorts of litigation, but relatively little of it has reached the Supreme Court. That may be changing. The justices are also considering whether Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, must answer questions from a special grand jury in Georgia investigating efforts to overturn former President Donald J. Trump’s election loss in the state.
In Ms. Ward’s case, a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, rejected a request from her and her husband to block a subpoena seeking metadata information about calls placed between November 2020 and January 2021. The subpoena did not seek information about the content or location of the calls.
Ms. Ward argued that the subpoena infringed on her First Amendment right to freedom of association.
The members of the majority — Judge Barry G. Silverman, appointed by President Bill Clinton, and Judge Eric D. Miller, appointed by President Donald J. Trump — wrote that Ms. Ward had not met her burden.
“Ward participated in a scheme to send spurious electoral votes to Congress, a scheme that the committee describes as ‘a key part’ of the ‘effort to overturn the election’ that culminated on Jan. 6,” the two judges wrote.
They added that Ms. Ward had invoked her Fifth Amendment rights when the committee sought to question her. “Having attempted the less intrusive method of asking Ward directly,” the two judges wrote, “the committee has a strong interest in pursuing its investigation by other means.”
The majority said the subpoena did not appear to affect political activities.
“There is little to suggest that disclosing Ward’s phone records to the committee will affect protected associational activity,” the two judges wrote, adding: “This subpoena does not target any organization or association. The investigation, after all, is not about Ward’s politics; it is about her involvement in the events leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, and it seeks to uncover those with whom she communicated in connection with those events.”
In dissent, Judge Sandra S. Ikuta, appointed by President George W. Bush, said the majority had given insufficient weight to the couple’s constitutional rights. “The communications at issue here between members of a political party about an election implicate a core associational right protected by the First Amendment,” Judge Ikuta wrote.
Source: nytimes.com
