After being stonewalled with document redactions by AT&T and Verizon in response to previous subpoenas issued by Sen. Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley — related to Special Counsel Jack Smith‘s “Arctic Frost” investigation — the two Republicans are again demanding records from the telecom companies, after they cooperated with the Biden administration‘s lawfare efforts against President Trump and his allies. Just the News reports:
Johnson previously requested such records from the companies, including AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen, but their responses were heavily redacted or failed to provide “the names of the individuals or entities associated with the phone numbers in the subpoenas,” said Grassley, of Iowa, and Johnson, of Wisconsin.
Documents released by the pair last year showed that the Biden administration’s FBI opened an investigation into President Donald Trump and hundreds of his allies over their Jan. 6 activities with weak evidence, which included obtaining phone records and geolocations of prominent lawmakers, Just the News previously reported.
“We’re still learning just how far Jack Smith’s fishing expedition went,” Grassley said in a statement to Just the News. “These subpoenas from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will shine additional light on whose phone data Smith requested, including which members of Congress were impacted.”
NLPC highlighted last year how Smith — after we argued that his Special Counsel appointment was unconstitutional — “spied” on several Republican U.S. Congress members and their political allies.
Besides our involvement regarding the constitutionality of certain Special Counsel appointments, NLPC also has a nexus with regard to the two telecom giants, with whom we are investors.
We have sponsored shareholder proposals in the past at Verizon. Our 2023 proposal sought disclosure of how the company cooperated with the government’s censorship efforts, including accusations that Verizon shut down text messaging services for political campaigns, pleas from officials to shut down networks that allegedly broadcast “misinformation,” and the removal of conservative news network OAN from its channel lineup.
(Also in the government cooperation realm, NLPC has also presented shareholder proposals at several big tech companies — including Alphabet (parent of Google and YouTube), Amazon, and Meta (parent of Facebook and Instagram) — also requesting disclosure about their cooperation with the federal government’s censorship efforts. And we have sought to hold big banks like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase accountable for their discriminatory practices against conservatives, like debanking and cooperating with the federal government in turning over customers’ financial transaction data without warrants or subpoenas.)
Dan Schulman/PHOTO: World Economic Forum (CC)
Lastly, there’s Verizon’s new CEO Dan Schulman. NLPC has long criticized the former PayPal CEO for both the money transfer company’s censorship policies, which included plans to penalize users who “spread misinformation” $2,500. A public backlash halted that scheme, which was blasted by another former PayPal executive.
“It’s hard for me to openly criticize a company I used to love and gave so much to,” PayPal’s former president David Marcus tweeted. “But @PayPal’s new [Acceptable Use Policy] goes against everything I believe in. A private company now gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with. Insanity.”
Schulman also was behind a corporate boycott of North Carolina in 2016 over its “transgender bathroom” law, killing a planned expansion of a data center in the state for PayPal. The woke former CEO also advanced DEI policies following the riots related to George Floyd’s death. Speaking at the 2018 commencement of Rutgers University, he said of his decisions as a corporate leader: “The ultimate point here is that whether you are a business person, a scholar, an artist, an activist or a doctor, we have to be guided by values of inclusion and freedom. These are not political decisions, these are values-based decisions.”
Schulman’s worst sin as CEO of PayPal, of course, was running its stock price into the ground. As a result he left the company three months earlier than planned in 2023. For all of the above reasons, NLPC had called for Schulman’s removal from Verizon’s board of directors. Instead the former first-place telecom elevated him to Lead Independent Director, and now he’s been promoted to CEO.
Given his history, it’s not surprising Schulman’s Verizon would deliver a response filled with redactions to a legitimate Congressional subpoena. His legacy as a corporate leader only gets worse.
