Exclusive — Rep. Scott Perry: FBI Seizing My Phone May Be ‘Reprisal’ for When ‘I Called for the Impeachment of Merrick Garland’

Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) shared speculation on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak that the FBI’s seizure of his personal mobile phone was a “reprisal” for his move to impeach U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2021.

Perry described the seizing of his phone by the FBI as “an incredible violation” of his constitutional rights and privacy.

“I have an official phone and I have my personal phone,” he stated. “Just to be clear, they seized my personal phone, which unfortunately, and so oftentimes unwittingly, you kind of go back and forth. I talk to my wife and my family almost exclusively on my personal phone. There are texts, emails, photographs of my children playing and growing up, pictures of our pets, and the dog, and all those kind of things on there, but there are also conversations, emails, etcetera, with other legislators and other constituents, and I think that’s a point that needs to be made.”

The FBI’s seizure of his phone conflicts with constitutional separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, Perry held.

Perry remarked, “There’s a reason why we have this thing in Congress called the Speech or Debate Clause, which protects members of Congress from the executive branch, because we don’t want them to try and use that to coerce you to vote a certain way or to not vote a certain way.”

He continued, “For instance, when Merrick Garland prevailed upon everyday citizens showing up at at school board meetings to question what their children were being taught, Merrick Garland issued, essentially, threat tags on these people, so I called for the impeachment of Merrick Garland. I actually introduced articles of impeachment on Merrick Garland. So am I now to think that because I did that, this is now a reprisal for that action, and is that a coercive thing?”

“There’s a reason these things are separated,” he emphasized, “and I don’t know that this has ever been done before, where they’ve taken this correspondence, and essentially, it’s all the correspondence that falls into my legislative duties. Did I have conversations with other legislators about objecting to the electors two years ago or almost two years ago? I most certainly did, and that’s not supposed to be part and parcel of what the executive branch is privy to, because they might use that to try and coerce you or to punish you for your viewpoints.”

He added, “My viewpoints, generally speaking, echo and represent the viewpoints of the district I’ve represented. That’s why it’s called a representative republic. So essentially, when they coerce and try and silence me, they’re trying to coerce and silence the  constituents that I work for — my bosses — that I represent.”

Perry recalled how the FBI seized his phone while he was traveling with his family.

“Instead of just going to my counsel and saying, ‘Hey, we would like to look at Mr. Perry’s phone,’ they visit me when I’m traveling with my family, my wife, and my two young children, and my extended family out of town and make a spectacle,” he noted. “None of that is necessary, and so you wonder, ‘Is the spectacle part of the intimidation?'”

Perry said the U.S. Department of Justice advised his legal counsel that he was not a “target of an investigation.”

He shared, “We’ve checked with our lawyers who have checked with the Department of Justice, and I am not a target of an investigation, yet that doesn’t stop the Department of Justice and the executive branch from seizing the personal cell phone of legislator in the legislative branch. There’s a whole separation of powers thing there.”