Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry, chairman of the Freedom Caucus, speaks with reporters following a closed-door meeting of GOP lawmakers on Monday, Oct. 16, 2023. (Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)
An FBI request to seize U.S. Rep. Scott Perry’s cellphone in 2022 shows the Pennsylvania Republican was in contact with the Trump campaign, administration officials and others working to overturn the 2020 presidential election, including Rudy Giuliani and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
The law enforcement agency filed an application for a warrant to seize records and data associated with Perry’s iPhone during special prosecutor Jack Smith’s investigation of the “fake electors” scheme that followed President Donald Trump’s 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden. Perry’s office did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
In what the Justice Department described as a fraudulent scheme to change the outcome, Trump supporters and Republican officials sought to substitute alternate electoral college votes for Trump in place of those won by Biden in seven swing states, including Pennsylvania.
The heavily-redacted warrant application was released by order of U.S. District Judge Jennifer P. Wilson in Harrisburg after a 2½-year court fight by PennLive.com and the York Daily Record and York Dispatch newspapers. Much of the information has already been published as part of other court filings related to the 2020 election investigation.
Since the 2020 election, county, state and federal judges and public officials of both political parties, and election experts, have concluded the vote was free and fair.
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Judge Wilson ordered the application to be released publicly on the recommendation of a federal magistrate who found the First Amendment presumption that court proceedings are public outweighed the interests of the Justice Department. The magistrate judge found the government failed to show that blocking out portions of the document would not protect its interest in secrecy.
Perry communicated with at least two people in Pennsylvania about the fake electors plan, the warrant application says. One is identified as the Pennsylvania Republican Party chairman, who was Lawrence Tabas in 2020. Tabas was selected as an alternate elector but ultimately did not serve as one because the state party conceded that Biden had won. Trump appointed Tabas to the Amtrak Board of Directors this week.
The application states Perry also had phone calls with another person who did sign a Pennsylvania elector certificate for Trump.
And Perry pushed for the appointment of a former Justice Department environmental lawyer, Jeff Clark, as acting attorney general after then-Attorney General Bill Barr refused to go along with efforts to overturn the election results, the application states. Perry persisted in the effort despite possessing no evidence of fraud in the election and statements that the Justice Department had no evidence to support concerns of fraud.
One official, whose name is redacted, told Perry, “we haven’t seen fraud on the scale that changed the outcome in Pennsylvania.”
Although the names of those with whom Perry communicated via phone calls, emails and messaging apps such as Signal are redacted, additional information included in the application makes it possible to identify some of the people.
Wilson’s order gives the newspapers until March 26 to notify the court whether they accept the redactions and leaves open the possibility of further proceedings over the document. Attorneys for the newspapers and the Justice Department did not return calls Wednesday.
Perry has been re-elected twice since 2020, including last November, when he defeated Democratic challenger Janelle Stelson. The Republican fought Smith’s efforts to access the data on his phone, which FBI agents seized and copied in August 2022.
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A court filing made public in 2023 showed Perry had exchanges with a number of Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers, each of whom signed a letter to members of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation urging them to reject electors appointed by then-Gov. Tom Wolf for Biden.
The U.S. House Jan. 6 committee that investigated the Capitol insurrection subpoenaed Perry in 2021, citing his involvement in attempts to install Clark as acting attorney general. In its final report, the J6 Committee found Perry had tried to help Trump overturn the election results.
Perry refused to testify before the committee but was the focus of a hearing in June 2022 that centered on efforts to pressure the Justice Department to support unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.
The panel cited messages to Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, on Dec. 26, 2020, noting that there were only 11 days until Congress was to certify the results and urging him to call Clark. Perry has never explained why he believed Clark should be appointed AG, since Trump only had days left in his administration.
It also noted that a White House visitor log showed Perry brought Clark to meet with Trump on Dec. 22, 2020, the day after Republicans, including Perry, met with the former president to discuss how to overturn the election.
Perry said in a January 2021 statement that he had worked with Clark, an assistant attorney general, on legislative matters throughout the Trump administration. “When President Trump asked if I would make an introduction, I obliged.”