WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court paved the way on Monday for the House committee investigating the Capitol attack to obtain phone records of Kelli Ward, the chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party.
As is its custom in ruling on emergency applications, the court’s brief order gave no reasons. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. noted dissents, also without giving reasons.
Experts in legal ethics have said that Justice Thomas should recuse himself from cases concerning the Jan. 6 attack in light of the efforts of his wife, Virginia Thomas, to overturn the 2020 election. Ms. Thomas’s activities included lobbying the speaker of the Arizona House to try to reverse Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the state.
Lower courts had ruled against Dr. Ward, an osteopathic physician who the committee said had played a key role in efforts to subvert the election.
A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, rejected a request from Dr. Ward and her husband to block a subpoena seeking metadata information about calls placed from November 2020 to January 2021. The subpoena did not seek information about the content or location of the calls.
In a Supreme Court filing, lawyers for the House committee said they had good reason to seek the records.
“Dr. Ward aided a coup attempt,” they wrote, adding that she had taken part in “several improper efforts” to overturn the election, including by planning to create false slates of...
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