On records – Hugo Lowell in The Guardian:

‘But, the letter says, the select committee believes Twitter has failed to turn over critical information requested by House investigators and even failed to commit to a timeline for complying with the panel’s requests issued in August.
Thompson said the select committee was interested in records from Reddit, since the “r/The_Donald” subreddit, which eventually migrated to a website of the same name, hosted significant discussion and planning related to the Capitol attack.
The chairman said House investigators were also seeking materials from Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube, because the video platform hosted significant communications by its users who played key roles in the Capitol attack.
Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, for instance, livestreamed on YouTube in the days leading up to the Capitol attack and after 6 January, while the attack itself was livestreamed on the platform as it was under way, the select committee noted.
Thompson said in the subpoena letter to Meta that the select committee was yet to receive any materials about Facebook’s role in allowing the spread of misinformation and disinformation about the results of the 2020 election despite repeated requests every month.
The select committee has been examining digital fingerprints left by the Trump White House and other individuals connected to the Capitol attack since the outset of the investigation, on everything from posts that show geolocations to metadata, the source said.
To that end, the select committee issued data preservation requests to 35 telecom and social media companies in August, demanding that they save the materials in the event the panel’s technical team required their release, the source said.
The Guardian first reported that month that the select committee, among other individuals, had requested the telecom and social media firms preserve the records of the former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in addition to a dozen House Republicans.
The select committee gave the social media companies a 27 January deadline to comply with the subpoenas, but it was not clear whether the organizations would comply. A spokesperson for Twitter and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Congressman Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House minority leader who refused a request for cooperation late on Wednesday by the select committee, has previously threatened telecom and social media companies if they comply with the bipartisan panel’s investigation.
“If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law,” McCarthy said at the time in August. “A Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.”’

Read the article here.

As I wrote yesterday I’m skeptical that a civil war in the US is imminent.

But the idea that the political process in a democracy is a game that is limited by certain rules has become unpopular in the US and Europe, very much indeed so.

Rigging the game is now proof of cleverness, smugness I would say.
Rig the game now, destroy it forever.