This is a heads up for everyone out there! Jeff Childers a Florida Lawyer and the originator of Coffee and Covid sent an email this morning with the following: I defended a client yesterday in a January 6 Committee deposition. I can’t say anything about the specifics, of course, for my client’s privacy, but I would like to note that the government investigators produced year-old text messages provided by the carrier, Verizon.

Although I’d been told that the carriers didn’t keep text messages longer than a few months, these were subpoenaed over a year after the fact. I would assume that ALL text messages are saved FOREVER. The carrier provides each text plus all the “metadata”; in other words, there is a lot of extra information attached to each text message. Examples include the specific date/time of each text, every phone number that received it, the legal name and billing address of every participant in the thread, and so on. I saw a flag for “deleted,” strongly suggesting that deleted texts are also retained, just marked as deleted.

Anyway. To slightly repurpose a slogan out of my attic of client advice, NEVER text or email anything that you wouldn’t want printed in a congressional report someday.