Judge Forces Republican Congressman To Hand Over Text Messages To Jack Smith

Republican Representative Scott Perry has lost his bid to shield more than 1,600 messages from prosecutors, as a judge ruled this week that he has to turn the messages over to special prosecutor Jack Smith. Perry has been under the microscope for his involvement in the attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and he had been messaging with members of the Trump campaign and administration, fellow lawmakers in D.C., and state officials during the time between the election and January 6th. There's a chance that revealing these messages could lead to the first charges against a sitting Congressman in this case, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Republican representative Scott Perry of Arizona, uh, got a bit of a problem going on this week. A federal court ruled that Mr. Perry must turn over more than 1,600 text messages, emails, and other electronic forms of communication to special prosecutor Jack Smith. Now, recently, we did learn through a leaked court document what some of these materials that special prosecutor Jack Smith has been trying to get his hands on, contain. They contain communications between Scott Perry and members of the Trump administration. They contain communications between Scott Perry and other lawmakers, and they contain communications between Scott Perry and state level lawmakers, and of course communications between Scott Perry and Jeffrey Clark, the man that he was trying to get Donald Trump to put in charge of the DOJ as part of the election theft scheme. And now thanks to this court ruling, all of those communications have to be handed over to Jack Smith pending appeal. But right now, Perry's lawyers have not said whether or not he is going to appeal This ruling.

Perry's cell phone was confiscated by federal authorities in August of 2022. So this battle for those messages on that phone, because Perry was instrumental, uh, there was no denying Perry was instrumental in trying to help the Trump administration overturn the results of the 2020 election. And Perry fought tooth and nail to avoid having to turn over those communications. That fight may be over. Now, so what does this mean? Well, first of all, Jack Smith, as far as we know, is wanting to get his hands on these communications to show the breadth of Donald Trump's scheme. Not necessarily again, as far as we know, to bring criminal charges against Scott Perry. But the court actually opened up the door for criminal charges to be brought. Here's what happened in their ruling, because Scott Perry, well, I guess, yeah, before the ruling, Scott Perry had argued with the court saying that my communications are protected because I'm a sitting lawmaker.

And so, yeah, I'm reaching out to people, I'm talking to the Trump people, I'm talking to the state people because hey, it's my job and it's protected by the speech or debate clause. I'm allowed to do these things because I have to vote to certify the electoral college votes and, you know, kind of need all the info. Not a bad argument. Legally speaking, it's not true at all. That's not why he was doing it. Um, but legally speaking, it's a solid argument. But even that court was like, no, what you were doing was actually outside of the scope of your job. The things you were doing were not related

In any way to that vote. It wasn't related to other legislation either. You were doing this on your own outside the scope of your job, and therefore you are not protected by the speech or debate clause. So if he appeals this and sends it to the US Supreme Court, the Supreme Court will be the ones to determine whether or not the speech or debate clause applies here. If they say, no, it does not, then Perry is 100% depending on what's in those messages opened up for possible criminal prosecution or indictments if Smith wants to go that route.