The Secret Service on Tuesday failed to provide Congress with new agency text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, informing the House committee investigating last year’s Capitol attack that the agency would continue to dig to determine whether there were which can be recovered.
The news was a blow to investigators since Jan. 6, who last week subpoenaed the Secret Service for texts they hoped would provide new details about former President Trump’s activities on the day a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol. They gave the agency a Tuesday morning deadline to comply.
But Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) said the set of new communications delivered by the agency excludes the texts the panel sought from Jan. 6 and the day before. Those messages were the focus of intense interest by the committee after investigators were told last week by a state watchdog that the texts had been “deleted” during a device replacement program.
“Today we received a letter that provided us with many documents and some data. However, we didn’t get the additional text messages we were looking for,” Murphy said in an interview with MSNBC.
“They continued with their efforts to migrate the devices and data and their process, as explained to us, was simply to let the agent determine if there was anything on their phones that was worth keeping that needed to be salvaged for federal records she continued. “And as a result today, they didn’t get any texts from their agents when they made that transition that was flagged for retention.”
Lawmakers were optimistic about the possible recovery of the texts after meeting Friday with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General Joseph Kufari, who had informed the committee of the “deleted” texts several days earlier, an allegation the Secret Service denied.
“One thing I’ve learned in this process is that when one evidentiary door closes, another one will open, and we’ll find a way,” Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Med.) told reporters Tuesday.
But investigators are also outraged that the Secret Service, which was in charge of Trump’s security on Jan. 6, may have erased material evidence surrounding the riots that day, which marked the first looting of the Capitol in more than two centuries.
“Without commenting on the specifics of this situation, I will say that I would be shocked and appalled if anyone in a leadership position oversaw the destruction of evidence related to the January 6 riot,” Raskin said.
The Secret Service predicted it would have little additional information to offer, with agency spokesman Anthony Guglielmi telling The Hill on Monday that there were no “hidden messages” the agency was hiding or anything else officials were “keeping” from the panel. .
He said most of what will be handed over to the committee are documents similar to the 800,000 they have already provided. But he said the agency would also clarify its policy on refraining from using text messages to communicate because of security concerns.
“It’s hard for people to understand, but we don’t communicate via text. It is in policy not to conduct business by text,” he said.
The Secret Service has consistently denied that it maliciously deleted text messages.
“There is no reason to claim that the texts are lost. I mean, how do you know these people were texting? They were told to upload their official records and they did. That’s partly what we’re going to report to the committee, all the data that we have. People say messages have been lost. How do you know messages were sent?” Guglielmi told The Hill.
Still, that response was not satisfactory to those leading the investigation, who accused Trump of not only instigating the march on the Capitol but seeking to lead it. They hoped the Secret Service communications might shed further light on his intentions to join the thousands of supporters trying to prevent Congress from certifying his election defeat.
“They got four requests from congressional committees on January 16th to preserve the records, and they had this planned migration for the 25th, I think, January, and no one along the way stopped and thought, ‘Well, maybe we shouldn’t data and device migration until we can meet these four requests from Congress,” Murphy said.
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On Tuesday, the National Archives upped the ante, demanding that the Secret Service conduct its own review of why it can’t declassify the messages.
“If any text messages are found to have been improperly deleted (regardless of their relevance to the OIG/Congressional investigation of the events of January 6, 2021), then the Secret Service must submit a report to NARA within 30 calendar days of the date of this report letter documenting the deletion,” Lawrence Brewer, the US government’s chief records officer, wrote in a letter to the DHS custodian of records.
“This report must include a full description of the records affected, a statement of the exact circumstances surrounding the deletion of the messages, a statement of the safeguards established to prevent further loss of records, and details of any agency action taken to rescue , retrieve, or reconstruct the records,” Brewer continued.
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