The admission that Pentagon employees’ phones were wiped was first revealed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by American Oversight against the Department of Defense and the Army. The watchdog group has been seeking records since Jan. 6 of former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, former Chief of Staff Kash Patel and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, among other prominent Pentagon officials — having filed initial FOIA requests just days after this storming of the capitol.
Miller, Patel and McCarthy are considered key witnesses to understanding the government’s response to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and former President Donald Trump’s response to the breach. All three were involved in the Defense Department’s response to sending National Guard troops to the US Capitol as the riot unfolded. There is no suggestion that the officers themselves deleted the records.
The government’s claim in the documents that officials’ text messages from that day had not been preserved is the latest blow to efforts to bring transparency to the events of January 6. It comes as the Department of Homeland Security is also under fire for the apparent loss of Secret Service communications that day.
Miller declined to comment. Patel and McCarthy did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Defense Department did not immediately respond to CNN’s request. US Army media relations chief Col. Kathy Wilkinson said in a statement that “it is our policy not to comment on ongoing litigation.”
American Oversight is now calling for an “interagency investigation” by the Department of Justice to investigate the destruction of the materials.
“It’s simply astonishing to believe that the agency didn’t understand the importance of preserving its records — esp [with regards] to senior officials who may have captured: what they were doing, when they were doing it, why they were doing it, that day,” Heather Sawyer, executive director of American Oversight, told CNN.
Sawyer said her organization learned the records had not been preserved by state attorneys earlier this year, and that confirmation was then noted in a joint status report filed in court in March.
“DOD and the Army have conveyed to the plaintiff that when an employee separates from DOD or the Army, he or she surrenders the government-issued phone and the phone is deleted,” the government said in the filing. “For those trustees who are no longer with the agency, the text messages are not preserved and therefore not searchable, although it is possible that certain text messages may have been recorded in other systems of record, such as email.”
The admission that the tapes were not preserved has taken on new significance in the wake of the ongoing scandal surrounding the loss of Secret Service agents’ texts since January 6.
“It just reveals a widespread lack of seriousness about the duty to keep records, to ensure accountability, to ensure accountability to their partners in the legislature and to the American people,” Sawyer said.
The Secret Service said her texts were lost as a result of a pre-planned migration of data from its agents’ cellphones that began on January 27, 2021, exactly three weeks after the attack on the US Capitol. Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Kufari first learned those texts were missing as early as May 2021, CNN previously reported.
The multi-agency pattern prompted her organization to write to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who already faces a demand from congressional Democrats to take over the DHS investigation into the missing Secret Service texts.
“U.S. Oversight accordingly urges you to investigate the actions of the Department of Defense in authorizing the destruction of records potentially related to this important matter of national concern and historical importance,” the letter said, while citing Democratic Senator Dick Durbin’s calls for the Department of Homeland Security to be investigated for such wrongdoing, the letter, shared with CNN on Tuesday, said. After submitting the FOIA requests to the Department of Defense and the Army, American Oversight says the Pentagon acknowledged the request on Jan. 15, 2021. American Oversight then filed a lawsuit in March to compel release of the records. In addition to the FOIA obligations that American Oversight claims the Pentagon ignored by not preserving the records, Sawyer also pointed to a separate federal records law that also requires the government to preserve records that have “informational value to the data therein.” .
“I think it’s very unlikely that anyone would argue with a straight face that the communications that occurred between these senior officials on January 6th would not have the informational value that the Federal Records Act is intended to achieve,” Sawyer said. American Oversight is seeking documents on several other Pentagon officials — some of whom remain in government service.
“For those custodians still employed by the agency, the Army has begun searches of text messages in response to FOIA requests and anticipates completing their additional searches by the end of September,” the Justice Department said in a July joint filing on the case.
A spokesman for the Department of Justice declined to comment.
What the Pentagon heard from the White House as the attack on the Capitol unfolded was the focus of a Jan. 6 House inquiry, and lawmakers say addressing security lapses from that day is a goal of their investigation.
The House Jan. 6 Committee last week released testimony Miller gave before the committee denying that former President Donald Trump gave an official order to deploy 10,000 troops to the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“I never received any direction or orders, nor was I aware of any plans of this nature,” Miller said in the video.
A committee spokesman declined to comment on records related to the Pentagon as of Jan. 6.
A former Defense Department official from a previous administration told CNN that it was ingrained in the new appointees at the time of their appointment that their work devices were subject to the Presidential Records Act and indicated that their communications would be archived. The source said that when they hand in their devices at the end of their jobs, all communication records are supposed to be backed up.
This story has been updated with additional details.
Add Comment