The modern American Senator is a creature of profound, almost biological delicacy. They are capable of summoning a mob to the steps of the Capitol, feeding that mob a steady diet of existential dread and lies, and then, when the glass breaks and the tear gas clears, they are capable of weeping softly because someone looked at their phone bill. We are currently witnessing a spectacle of indignation from lawmakers who are shocked, simply shocked, that their communications on and around January 6 are being treated as evidence. They argue that this is an invasion of privacy. They argue it is political persecution. They argue that a government official plotting to overturn an election should be afforded the same confidentiality as a teenager sneaking a cigarette behind the bleachers.
If these senators did not want their phone logs scrutinized by federal investigators, there was a very simple preventative measure they could have taken. They should not have spent the weeks leading up to January 6 parroting Donald Trump’s lies. They should not have cheered on a soft coup from the floor of the Senate. They should not have coordinated objections to certified electoral votes in a cynical bid for airtime. And they certainly should not have acted surprised when the mob they helped summon decided to take the rhetoric of “trial by combat” literally.
The complaint creates a fascinating cognitive dissonance. These politicians want the credit for being “fighters” who stood up for the Big Lie, but they want the legal exposure of a bystander. They want to be the arsonist who is deeply offended that the fire marshal is asking where they bought the gasoline. But the timeline of that day does not allow for this kind of selective amnesia. We have the receipts. We have the video. We have the memory of the smell of bear mace in the Rotunda.
Let’s rewind the tape to the event itself, before the history books were rewritten by the Heritage Foundation and cable news spin rooms. January 6 was not a sightseeing tour. It was a visceral, violent assault on the transfer of power. It began with rally rhetoric that was designed to incite. It began with the President of the United States telling a furious crowd that they would lose their country if they didn’t “fight like hell.” It began with the political class, including many of the senators now whining about their call logs, lending their institutional credibility to a fantasy.
Then came the reality. The windows of the People’s House were smashed inward. Police officers were beaten with flagpoles, crushed in doorframes, and sprayed with chemicals. The Confederate battle flag, a symbol of treason that never reached the Capitol during the actual Civil War, was paraded through the halls by a man who felt entirely comfortable doing so. The mob smeared feces on the walls. They ransacked offices. They turned the seat of American democracy into a crime scene, fueled by the very lies these senators helped broadcast.
The violence was specific and targeted. The crowd erected a gallows on the lawn. They chanted “Hang Mike Pence” with a rhythmic, terrifying sincerity. They hunted for the Vice President of their own party because he refused to violate the Constitution. They scoured the hallways asking “Where’s Nancy?” with the intent to do harm to the Speaker of the House. The senators who are now worried about their privacy were, at that moment, cowering in secure locations, fearing for their lives from the very people they had radicalized.
For a brief, flickering moment, there was clarity. In the immediate aftermath, there was bipartisan outrage. We saw tearful floor speeches. We saw solemn vows to “never forget.” We saw Lindsey Graham declare that he was out. We saw Kevin McCarthy admit that the President bore responsibility. It seemed, for about twenty-four hours, that the shock of seeing their own workplace desecrated had broken the fever.
But the survival instinct of the political animal is stronger than its conscience. The slow-motion amnesia began almost immediately. The narrative shifted. The insurrectionists were rebranded. First they were Antifa, then they were FBI agents, then they were “patriots” who were just asking questions, and finally, under the current iteration of Trumpism, they are “hostages.” The people who beat cops and defecated in the Capitol are now celebrated as martyrs. Donald Trump promised pardons. He handed them out like merch at rallies. He celebrated the choir of inmates singing the national anthem over a prison phone line.
And now, the circle is complete. We sit atop a movement where the same politicians who helped fuel the biggest act of sedition in modern U.S. history want payouts, immunity, and privacy. They want to ensure that the call logs—the digital footprints that might show exactly how deep they were in the coordination—remain buried. They want us to believe that basic investigative work is some shocking overreach of the deep state. They want us to accept that investigating a coup attempt is more offensive than the coup attempt itself.
This is the audacity of the co-conspirator. They are banking on the idea that the public is too tired to care about the details anymore. They are hoping that the sheer volume of noise has drowned out the specifics of the violence. They want us to forget the officers who died. They want us to forget the terrifying footage of the mob breaking through the barricades. They want us to forget that they were the ones texting the White House, begging the President to call off the dogs, only to turn around and pet the dogs once the danger had passed.
The call logs matter because they connect the rhetoric to the action. They distinguish between the politician who was merely reckless and the politician who was actively operational. If a senator was on the phone with the White House while the mob was hunting the Vice President, we have a right to know what was said. If a representative was coordinating with organizers of the march while knowing the potential for violence, that is not a private matter. That is a matter of public record. That is the bare minimum consequence for trying to overturn an election and nearly getting your own coworkers killed.
The demand for privacy is a confession of guilt. Innocent people do not generally worry that their phone records will reveal a plot to overthrow the government. People who were just doing their jobs do not panic when the timeline is reconstructed. The panic comes from the knowledge that the “public face” of the senator—the brave defender of liberty—does not match the “private face” found in the texts. The private face is likely scared, complicit, and fully aware of the monster they helped create.
We cannot allow them to rewrite the ending of this story. The attack on the Capitol was not a weather event. It was a man-made disaster. It was engineered by a specific group of people who lied about an election, radicalized a base, and pointed them at a target. The people who did the pointing do not get to complain when the investigators look at their fingers.
The whining about “overreach” is a distraction. It is a smoke bomb thrown to cover their exit. They are trying to turn the perpetrators into the victims. They want you to feel sorry for the poor senator whose texts are being read, so you don’t feel angry at the senator who helped break the country. It is a cynical, manipulative ploy, and it relies on us losing our collective memory.
But we remember the gallows. We remember the zip ties. We remember the shattered glass. And we remember that while the mob was storming the gates, these senators were checking their phones. Now, we just want to know who was on the other end of the line.
The Fine Print for Grownups
The attempt to shield these communications is not about legal principle; it is about historical erasure. If we allow these officials to hide their involvement under the guise of legislative privilege or privacy, we are effectively legalizing the next coup. We are establishing a precedent that the architects of insurrection are immune from scrutiny, while the foot soldiers go to prison. The call logs are the black box of the crash. They contain the data that explains why the plane went down. To seal them is to guarantee that we will crash again. The discomfort of a few powerful men is a small price to pay for the truth of how close we came to losing everything.