September 07, 2021 10:43 AM UTC

Boebert Bumbles Threat To Telecom Companies

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• by: Colorado Pols

We took note late last week of Georgia GOP freshman freakshow Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s threat to “shut down” telecommunications companies who comply with records preservation requests from the U.S. House Select Committee investigating violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. The Select Committee issued a request for records to be preserved pertaining to a number of members of Congress who may have been in contact with insurrectionists plotting the attack or on the scene that day–including Colorado’s own freshman Rep. Lauren “Q*Bert” Boebert. MTG’s threats echoed but were ominously more sweeping than a similar warning issued last week by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

And as HuffPo reports today, Boebert is sure enough busy making threats of her own:

The lawmakers, including Reps. Mo Brooks (of Alabama), Madison Cawthorn (N.C), Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.) and Lauren Boebert (Colo.), sent letters to 13 businesses telling them not to comply with requests from the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6.

The committee requested that certain phone and social media companies preserve the records of individuals not publicly identified as linked to the insurrection as well as those involved in the “Stop the Steal” rally. The House probe is attempting to determine who was actively involved in planning the violence aimed at overturning the presidential election. Some of the relevant subjects could involve Republican lawmakers, including some of those who sent the letters…

In the letters, the GOP lawmakers reportedly threatened the companies, saying they would use “all legal remedies” to go after them if they comply with the committee’s requests.

Unfortunately, in the case of at least one of those telecom companies, their contact information was more than a little outdated:

The letter that was addressed to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, which was obtained by Forbes, revealed some of the Republican Party’s strong-arm tactics being used against businesses to persuade them to obstruct justice, critics said. Except Mayer departed from Yahoo in 2017. [Pols emphasis] Yahoo’s current CEO is Guru Gowrappan.

We’ll confess that we didn’t know who Yahoo’s CEO is either, mostly because we don’t remember the last time we visited Yahoo. But we shouldn’t lose sight in schadenfreude over Boebert’s bumbled threats against telecom companies of the troubling nature of these threats and what they represent. Despite their angry denial, these lawmakers including Boebert played a direct role in inciting the violence that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. We know about Boebert’s public-facing agitation for some kind of extraordinary event on January 6th, including her infamous “Today is 1776” message on the morning of the riots and stupendously ill-advised Tweet about Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s location as rioters stormed the Capitol.

There’s a lot more we need to know about what Boebert was expecting to happen on January 6th, and her phone records leading up to and on that day could be the key to uncovering the full extent of her complicity in the violence. Given the certainty of litigation to resolve the question of access to these records, Boebert’s pre-emptive threats against telecom companies look an awful lot like witness intimidation.

No one is asking, “what has Boebert got to hide?” Because it’s obvious.