Reporting

Congress wants to know if President Donald Trump taped his conversations with fired FBI Director James Comey. A House panel led by Reps Mike Conaway (R-TX) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) sent a letter to White House counsel Don McGahn demanding the release of any "tapes" of conversations between Comey and President Trump.

The president first suggested the existence of such tapes after Comey revealed that he wrote memos of his private conversations with President Trump leading up to his firing. Reps Conaway and Schiff are representing the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's Russia investigation, and a separate bipartisan group of Senate Judiciary Committee members led by Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) also sent letters requesting the notes Comey wrote documenting the same meetings with Trump. The Senate group requested the memos from Professor Daniel Richman, the friend Comey gave his notes to, and the House group requested any memos still in Comey's possession. Reps Schiff and Conaway provided a deadline of June 23.

White House social-media director Dan Scavino Jr. violated a federal law that bars public officials from using their positions for political activity when he urged President Donald Trump's supporters to defeat a GOP congressman, the Office of Special Counsel has concluded. As a result, Scavino was issued a warning letter and advised that additional violations of the law could result in further action, according to a June 5 letter that the office sent to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which filed a complaint about Scavino's tweet.

Scavino's April 1 message called on the “#TrumpTrain” to take out Rep Justin Amash (R-MI) in an upcoming primary, referring to him as “a big liability.” Rep Amash is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group that President Trump had blamed at the time for derailing legislation that would have repealed parts of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Even though Scavino was tweeting from his personal account, his page at the time listed his official White House position and featured a photo of him inside the Oval Office.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced that the US Department of Agriculture is awarding four loans to help provide broadband service in rural portions of California, Illinois, Iowa and Texas. USDA’s partnerships with more than 500 telecommunications providers across the country fund broadband infrastructure investments that are uniquely designed to meet the specific needs of each rural community. These projects connect residents, businesses, health care facilities and community facilities – including schools, libraries and first responders – to the internet. The $43.6 million announced today will add nearly 1,000 miles of fiber to fund broadband service.

On August 4, 2015, a number of public interest advocates (including the Benton Foundation) filed a petition for rulemaking asking the Federal Communications Commission to repeal Section 42.6 of the Commission’s rules, Retention of Telephone Records, that requires telephone companies to retain the detailed call records of their customers. The petitioners explained that the regulation was unduly burdensome and ineffectual and posed an ongoing threat to the privacy and security of American consumers. The FCC is seeking comment on the petition. Comments are due June 16; reply comments are due July 3.

Multichannel video programming distributors (pay-TV providers) have a July 10 deadline for making their TV Everywhere programming more accessible to the blind and visually impaired everywhere. The Federal Communications Commission's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau was reminding those MVPDs this week that as of that date they are required to pass through a secondary audio stream of emergency information if they allow their subs to access linear (prescheduled) programming services via second-screen devices—laptops, phones—as part of their service, yet another step in the FCC's ongoing implementation of the Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) of 2010 requirement that emergency information in crawls and graphics that break into regular programming are accessible.

The definition of linear programming subject to the requirement is network programming that "can only be received via a connection provided by the MVPD using an MVPD-provided application or plug-in." So, it does not apply to programming that is only distributed via the internet (Netflix, Hulu) that is accessible by subs using either an MVPD-provided broadband connection or a third-party ISP connection.

President Donald Trump broke his public silence June 9 on former FBI director James B. Comey’s testimony to Congress in the Russia probe, accusing him in a tweet of lying under oath and calling him a “leaker.” A day after he had allowed surrogates to respond for him, President Trump took to Twitter to attack Comey directly, writing: “Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication … and WOW, Comey is a leaker!”

President Trump’s statement came as surrogates fanned out to defend the president and his personal lawyer was preparing to file a “complaint” early next week over Comey’s testimony to the Department of Justice’s Inspector General’s Office and the Senate Judiciary Committee, apparently.

Russian hackers were meddling with the 2016 US election right from the start of the campaign season. Former FBI director James Comey testified before a Senate Intelligence hearing on June 8, a month after President Donald Trump fired him on May 9. The hearing, centered on Comey's conversations with President Trump, comes amid the FBI's investigations into potential campaign ties with Russia that continue to haunt the commander-in-chief. Allegations of Russian influence on the US presidential election stretch all the way back before the midyear Democratic National Convention, when hackers spear-phished officials and released documents through WikiLeaks.

James Comey may have sucked up all the oxygen June 8 on Capitol Hill, but NTIA Administrator-nominee David Redl, previously senior counsel for the House Commerce Committee, addressed several issues of interest to technology and telecommunications folks during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee:

On striking the right balance for spectrum: "One of the core jobs that NTIA has is balancing the need for spectrum for government users to meet their very important needs and balancing that with the need for spectrum in the commercial sector ... there's always an opportunity for more efficient use of spectrum."
On the ICANN transition: "The reality is that we're in the situation we're in ... We're going to have to move forward and be a vigorous representative of U.S. interests before ICANN. It would have been very difficult to put the genie back in the bottle."
On FirstNet: "The statute is clear, that NTIA is to work with FirstNet and the states, to make sure there is deployment, particularly in rural areas."
On expanding rural broadband: "Everyone in America should be able to benefit from the economic value of broadband ... I would want to look across all the different challenges facing individual states, particularly rural areas, and try to find individual mechanisms that will help support private sector investment in those places."
On 5.9 GHz spectrum and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications: "As we go forward and look at ways to increase use of that band ... we need to ensure that those systems that are planned for and incumbents are protected as we look at additional uses."

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and Sen Ron Johnson (R-WI) each called network neutrality a "slogan" that solves no real problems, with the senator also arguing that the Internet should have paid fast lanes. "It’s a great slogan," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said, when asked by a radio host what net neutrality is. "But in reality what it involves is Internet regulation, and the basic question is, 'Do you want the government deciding how the Internet is run?'"

Chairman Pai, who is touring midwestern states to meet with rural Internet service providers about broadband deployment, appeared with Sen Johnson on WTMJ Radio in Milwaukee. "As chairman Pai said, net neutrality is a slogan," Sen Johnson said. "What you really want is an expansion of high-speed broadband, and in order to do that you have to create the incentives for those smaller ISPs to invest. They don’t really control their own fiber if the government tells them exactly how they’re going to use their investment." Because of net neutrality rules, "there’s less incentive to invest, so we’ll have less high-speed broadband," Sen Johnson said.

T-Mobile’s business selling service to low-income users whose costs are paid, at least in part, through the Universal Service Fund (USF) Lifeline program is “non-sustainable,” said Braxton Carter, T-Mobile chief financial officer. T-Mobile Lifeline customers represent 4.4 million of the carrier’s 73 million subscribers and “we’re going to eliminate them from the base,” said Carter.

Carter attributed the change in direction to changes in the Lifeline program associated with requirements for voice and data service. The changes to the Lifeline data apparently relate to the FCC’s plan to raise the minimum monthly allotment to 2 gigabytes in 2018 from an initial 500 megabytes. “We don’t think Lifeline is a valuable or sustainable product for our base,” he said. Based on Carter’s comments, some or all of those customers apparently are sold through companies that buy service from T-Mobile on a wholesale basis. Meanwhile, smaller rural carriers have been reluctant to offer Lifeline broadband because the rate they would have to charge for the service would be in the range of $100, which the $9.25 discount wouldn’t go far to cover – a situation the rural carriers attribute to an insufficient USF program budget.