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The Secret Service deleted text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, that were requested by officials investigating the breach of the U.S. Capitol, according to a report this week by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general.
Inspector General Joseph Kufari said in a letter to congressional committees investigating the January 6 riot that “many” messages were “deleted as part of a device replacement program” after his office requested electronic communications from the Secret Service during of their “assessment of events at the Capitol on January 6.”
“It’s obviously troubling,” Congressman Benny Thompson, Md., chairman of the House Jan. 6 Committee and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told Axios on Thursday. “If there’s a way to reconstruct the texts or what have you, we will.”
Cuffari also wrote that the requested collection of documents was delayed for weeks because the Department of Homeland Security insisted that all records needed legal review, creating “confusion as to whether all records were submitted.”
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A U.S. Secret Service agent takes position on the street as President Donald Trump’s motorcade arrives at the White House in Washington after golfing at his Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, on Nov. 8, 2020, a day after he was defeated by the newly elected President Joe Biden. A government watchdog found that Secret Service agents deleted text messages sent and received around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol after an inspector general requested them as part of the investigation into the riot. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
The Secret Service rejected the inspector general’s claim, saying some records were lost during a device migration that occurred before the request, but all requested records were delivered.
A police car of the US Secret Service Uniformed Division is parked outside the White House in Washington on April 21, 2022. (Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
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“The insinuation that the Secret Service maliciously deleted text messages after a request is false,” said Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.
Committee Chairman Benny Thompson, D-Miss, leaves for a break during the seventh hearing held by the Special Committee to Investigate the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol on July 12, 2022, at the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, DC (Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)
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He said the device migration began in January, well before the OIG requested the records in late February, and none of the texts sought “were lost in the migration.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
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