Salesforce to provide RNC records to Jan. 6 panel unless court steps in

Salesforce, a vendor that holds sensitive financial data and records of the Republican National Committee, has informed party leaders that it will begin producing documents to the Jan. 6 select committee by Wednesday unless a court intervenes.

The RNC revealed the development in a court filing Tuesday evening urging U.S. District Court Judge Tim Kelly to immediately step in to prevent documents from reaching the select panel.

The party sued the select committee last week, revealing that the panel had subpoenaed Salesforce last month and contending that the scope of the subpoena was so broad that it amounted to an illegitimate incursion on political rivals. The select committee dismissed that notion, emphasizing that it is pursuing evidence that the RNC’s post-election email deluge in 2020 — often coordinated with the Trump campaign —helped spur distrust in the results and contributed to the atmosphere that preceded the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The RNC indicated in its new filing that Salesforce had initially planned to withhold documents from the select committee while the lawsuit was pending. But the company changed course.

“Late in the afternoon on March 10, 2022, Salesforce’s counsel informed the RNC that after discussions with staff for the Select Committee … Salesforce indicated that it would not be able to withhold production during the pendency of this matter,” RNC attorneys wrote.

“Salesforce’s counsel represented to the RNC that absent a pending motion for emergency relief from this court, Salesforce would begin to produce documents to the Select Committee in compliance with the Salesforce Subpoena on Wednesday, March 16, 2022.”

The RNC has added Salesforce as a defendant in the lawsuit “in order to ensure it can obtain effective and complete emergency relief until this dispute is finally resolved on the merits,” the party’s attorneys write. “Although the RNC has named Salesforce as a defendant in this action, the RNC does not believe that Salesforce has breached any contractual or other duty to the RNC.”

The push by the select committee for the RNC’s data represents an aggressive effort by the panel to determine whether Trump allies used the official party apparatus to stoke false claims about election fraud and drive up attendance at his rally on Jan. 6, which bled into the mob attack on the Capitol.

The select committee’s subpoena to Salesforce, posted publicly by the RNC on Tuesday, calls for “all performance metrics and analytics related to email campaigns by or on behalf of Donald Trump for President, Inc., The Republican National Committee, or the Trump Make America Great Against Committee” for the period between Nov. 3, 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021.”

The subpoena also seeks records related to “login sessions by individuals associated with the Trump campaign or the RNC into Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud platform, including all related metadata.”

The committee is also asking for Salesforce’s internal analyses related to the pro-Trump protests on Jan. 5 and 6.