The agency, whose January 6 text messages could presumably shed a lot of light on what Trump was up to on the day of the insurrection, swears its communications were innocently lost.
Something you’ve probably heard about once or twice in your travels is that on January 6, 2021, a group of Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the U.S Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and while they were there, ran through the building chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” a threat deemed credible enough that his Secret Service detail moved the V.P. to a secure location. As we also recently learned, according to former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, on the day of the attack, Trump was informed that some of his supporters were armed and should not be allowed onto the Ellipse for his speech—to which the then president said let ’em in anyway, “they’re not here to hurt me”—and, separately, that Trump allegedly assaulted a Secret Service agent who told him he could not go to the Capitol to take part in the insurrection.
For all of these reasons, it would be particularly helpful to learn about the real-time communications of the Secret Service agents on the scene, which could probably shed some light on (1) a possible threat of assassination on the vice president of the United States and (2) exactly what the president of the United States, who incited the violent attack, was up to when all of this was happening. Unfortunately, though, it apparently never crossed the agency’s mind to preserve said communications, which, it turns out, were permanently deleted. Yes, really!
CNN reports that the Secret Service was “only able to provide a single text exchange”—as in one, as in the number closest to zero—to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general who had requested a month’s worth of records from 24 Secret Service members, according to a letter the agency sent to the January 6 committee. The Washington Post separately reported on Tuesday that the agency “has determined it has no new texts to provide Congress relevant to its January 6 investigation,” and that any messages that were exchanged between agents around the time of the Capitol attack were purged, according to a senior official familiar with the matter. In an interview with MSNBC, January 6 committee member Zoe Lofgren said: “This obviously, this 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 currently.” Which is politician for “This is shady as fuck.”
But wait, it gets worse! Per CNN:
In other words, the Secret Service was told on January 16, 2021, not to delete anything, and then 11 days later…started deleting everything. Because their phones were being migrated. Which seems like something that could have been temporarily paused given the circumstances. (Separately, it seems like an extremely bad policy to rely on rank-and-file employees to ensure highly sensitive communications—like ones of potential national security significance—get appropriately saved.)
At this time, you might be wondering if, in this day and age, it’s actually possible to permanently delete any electronic communication, which generally seems to live on forever in some form or another. And if you are, you’re not alone!
Speaking to the Post, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi insisted that the agency did not, per the paper, “maliciously delete text messages,” and that this was truly a case of them being lost because of the aforementioned plan to replace staffers’ phones. All of which seemingly merits further investigation, to say the least.
Source: Vanity Fair
Howard Elliott points out