The revelation underscores concerns raised in a recent letter to Congress from the inspector general, who accused the agency of failing to preserve records needed for the Jan. 6 investigation.
Inspector General Joseph Kufari — having already obtained an initial batch of documents, including “hundreds of thousands of disclosures of agency documents, policies, radio communications, emails, briefings and interviews” — requested in June 2021 text messages sent and received by 24 Secret The service personnel between December 7, 2020 and January 8, 2021, according to the letter, the details of which were not previously disclosed. The letter did not identify the 24 employees.
“The Secret Service sent the responsive records they identified as a text message conversation between former US Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund and former Secret Service Uniformed Division Chief Thomas Sullivan requesting assistance on January 6, 2021, and notified agency that it does not have any additional records in response to the DHS OIG’s request for text messages,” Assistant Director Ronald Rowe wrote in the Jan. 6 letter to the committee.
Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who sits on the election commission, said in an interview with MSNBC earlier Tuesday that the panel had received “one text message” that she had not yet seen, but that the panel would “pursue more information as commission soon.”
“They gave no indication in their letter that they secured the phones in question and did any forensic work on them. That’s something we want to know,” Lofgren said. “This obviously doesn’t look good. Coincidences can happen, but we really need to get to the bottom of this and get a lot more information than we have right now.”
In addition to the inspector general’s requests, the Secret Service was also sent a broad preservation and production request from Congress on January 16, 2021, which requested documents and materials related to January 6. A second request in March from several House committees specifically asked for communications “received, prepared or sent” between Jan. 5 and Jan. 7.
The agency explained that employees should perform the necessary backup of the recordings from their phones. The letter said the service provided staff with a “step-by-step” guide to saving mobile phone content, including text messages, ahead of the phone migration, which began on January 27. It explains that “all Secret Service employees are responsible for the proper preservation of government records that may be created by text messages.”
The Secret Service wrote in the letter that it was still working to determine whether any relevant information was lost in the phone migration, but said it was “currently unaware of any text messages issued by Secret Service personnel” that were were requested by the inspector general, “which were not retained.”
“The Secret Service continues to make extensive efforts to further evaluate whether relevant text messages sent or received by 24 individuals identified by DHS OIG were lost due to the Intune migration and, if so, whether such texts can be recovered.” , writes Rowe. “These efforts include mining all available metadata to determine what, if any, texts were sent or received on the identified individuals’ devices.”
The agency interviewed the 24 users “to determine whether the messages were stored in locations that had not yet been searched by the Secret Service.”
The letter noted that the Secret Service provided 10,569 pages of documents in an initial response to a congressional subpoena last week. This output included reports on follow-up actions, timelines and policy changes in response to 6 January. The agency also sent the committee details on how it classified then-Vice President Mike Pence’s move during the riot as an “Unusual Defense Event.”
In a rush to respond to last week’s requests, the letter noted, the Secret Service sent the material unredacted and asked the committee to consult with the agency before releasing any information to the public.
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Mary Kay Maloney contributed to this report.
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