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Question for techie types. Are texts stored on the phone or are they more like emails which are stored on a server somewhere?

There is no technical requirement to retain the texts on a server. Your typical smart phone has the capacity to store the texts of an army of Strzok-Page pairs. E.g., my phone has 288gb. That's a stupefying number of texts. So, there is no technical reason for a carrier to store a text, once it has been received by its addressee(s), which typically happens in a few seconds.

Of course, that doesn't mean the carriers don't store it. After all, disk space is cheap, so why not?

Also bear in mind, there are two levels of storage. There is metadata: the sender and receiver(s) and the date, and maybe the length, of each message. Metadata could be relevant to billing, depending on how much the carrier's business plan depends on nuisance charging. And then there is the actual content. All of the above, of course, can be grabbed by the feds.

But rest assured, whatever the carriers keep or discard, there is that gigantic server farm in Bluffdale, Utah, which has the capacity to store all voice traffic, not to mention all texts, metadata plus data. What could go wrong?

E.g., it's approaching New Year's Day, 2017, and an incoming Trump appointee on vacation in the Caribbean gets a call from a government official in Washington. Only problem is, the government official is of the Russian, not the American, government, and he's newly gobsmacked by the Muslim Traitor's sanctions against his country, and wonders WTF the American can do ...

Now imagine you are Andy McCabe, and you have no use whatsoever for that Trump appointee, having tangled with him in the past over an FBI personnel issue, and you have (illegitimate) access to Bluffdale, and it's time to redeem the "insurance policy" and save the Deep State and your sorry ass!

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so, how does this location square up with “hammer” huber’s 10-20?