People don't bother looking for the actual facts.
As pointed out by Orin Kerr, law professor at Berkley.
Reporters looking into the Schiff and McGhan investigations should be making sure that when they report about “subpoenas,” they actually mean subpoenas and not 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) orders (which are served like subpoenas). The latter are a lot more invasive than the former.
To make a long ECPA short, subpoenas are largely unregulated but can’t (in the Internet context) get the govt much. An account name, IP addresses it was assigned, not much else.
But 2703(d) orders are more like warrants: a judge needs to sign off on it and its showing of cause. And it can get all non-content transactional records of the account, like who you contacted and when.
If you’re an investigator and you want to know who a suspect communicated with, a 2703(d) order tells you that for that account; a subpoena doesn’t. Pretty big difference.
If DOJ only got a subpoena for X, that plausibly means someone else was the suspect (the subject of a 2703d order), revealing contacts with X’s account, and then a subpoena just to see who X is.
But if DOJ got a 2703d order for X’s account, it plausibly means X was a suspect and DOJ went to a judge and made the case for why there may be evidence in X’s contacts.
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Basic translation of what really happened.
The DOJ was investigating a staffer. And as par the course, they sought out contacts that staffer had. Nothing more.
