The House Jan. 6 Committee can obtain data on the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) fundraising email push, a federal judge ruled on Sunday night.
The panel originally requested the documents in order to determine if the RNC’s fundraising efforts, that peddled ex-President Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies, may have helped fuel the Capitol insurrection.
Judge Timothy Kelly, who was appointed by ex-President Donald Trump, ruled against the RNC in its lawsuit against the Jan. 6 panel and Salesforce, the marketing software company that the RNC used to send fundraising emails and which has since been subpoenaed by the panel. The RNC sued the committee and Salesforce to block the subpoena for data relating to the RNC and the Trump campaign’s fundraising emails sent from the day of the election on Nov. 3 to Jan. 6, including their success rate and who worked on the email push.
“It is hard to imagine a more important interest for Congress than to preserve its own ability to carry out specific duties assigned to it under the Constitution,” Kelly wrote in his 53-page ruling.
Kelly rejected the RNC’s arguments for halting the subpoena, including its claims that the committee’s subpoena is overly broad, would expose sensitive information about donors and doesn’t have a valid legislative purpose. Like other Republicans who have tried to skirt the committee’s requests, the RNC argued the panel was invalid because of the structure of how it came together.
“House Defendants are not seeking, and Salesforce is not producing, any disaggregated information about any of the RNC’s donors, volunteers, or email recipients, including any person’s personally identifiable information,” the judge wrote.
Kelly also pointed out that “Salesforce itself acknowledged” that there was a risk of more political violence after Jan. 6 and had taken action to keep the RNC from using its services “in any way that could lead to violence,” in the software firm’s words.
However, Kelly noted in his May 1 decision that the deadline for committee’s subpoena was the next day on May 2, and he ruled that the RNC would need more time to file an appeal if they chose to do so.
Kelly thus ordered an administrative injunction on the subpoena and gave the RNC until May 5 to appeal. The injunction will “dissolve automatically” if the organization doesn’t appeal, and the committee will receive the data from Salesforce, the judge ruled.
Read the ruling below:
