Congressman Benny Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, who chairs the committee, wrote in a letter Friday to Secret Service Director James Murray that the group is seeking Secret Service text messages from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, and reiterated three previous requests for information from Congress committees.
“The Select Committee was informed that USSS deleted text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021 as part of a ‘device replacement program.’ In a statement released on July 14, 2022, the USSS said it “began to factory reset its mobile phones as part of a pre-planned quarterly system migration. In the process, data residing on some phones was lost. ’ However, according to this USSS statement, “none of the texts send it [DHS Office of Inspector General] was looking for, was lost in the migration,” Thompson wrote.
“Accordingly, the select committee is seeking relevant text messages as well as any follow-up reports that were issued in all USSS units relating to or in any way related to the events of January 6, 2021,” he continued.
The Secret Service said Saturday morning that it would respond to the special committee’s subpoena “quickly.”
The Jan. 6 panel planned to contact Secret Service officials to ask about the deletion of text messages from the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol and the day before, including the agency’s process for clearing files, to see if that policy observed, Thompson told CNN.
Earlier Friday, Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Kufari told the committee in a briefing that the Secret Service did not conduct its own after-action review regarding Jan. 6 and chose to rely on the inspector general’s investigation, according to a source familiar with the matter. with a briefing. The Secret Service, Kafari told the group, had not fully cooperated in his investigation.
Thompson echoed the inspector general’s remarks about the lack of cooperation, telling CNN, “Well, they haven’t been fully cooperative” and that the group has “had limited engagement with the Secret Service.”
“We will be moving forward with some further engagements now that we have met with the IG,” he said, adding that the panel would work “to try to establish whether these texts can be resurrected.”
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement Saturday that the agency has provided “full and unwavering cooperation” to the House committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 riot “and that is not changing.”
The agency provided special agents to testify and turned over nearly 800,000 emails, radio broadcasts and operational and planning records, according to Guglielmi.
The Secret Service deleted text messages from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, shortly after they were requested by oversight officials investigating the agency’s response to the riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to a letter provided to a special House committee investigating the riot.
The letter, which was originally sent to the House and Senate Homeland Security Committees by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, said the messages were deleted from the system as part of a device replacement program after the guard asked the agency for records related to its electronic communications.
“First, the Department notified us that many text messages from the US Secret Service from January 5 and 6, 2021, were deleted as part of a device replacement program. The USSS deleted these text messages after the OIG requested records of electronic communications from the USSS as part of our assessment of the events at the Capitol on January 6,” Kufari stated in the letter.
“Second, DHS staff have repeatedly told OIG inspectors that they are not authorized to provide records directly to OIG and that those records must first be reviewed by DHS attorneys,” Kufari added. “This review resulted in a delay of weeks in receiving records from the OIG and created confusion as to whether all records had been submitted.”
A DHS official provided CNN with a timeline of when the IG was informed by the Secret Service about the missing information caused by the data transfer. In a statement Thursday night, the Secret Service said the IG first requested the information on Feb. 26, 2021, but did not specify when the agency acknowledged the problem.
According to a DHS official, the Secret Service notified the IG about the migration issue multiple times, starting on May 4, 2021, then again on December 14, 2021, and in February 2022.
In a statement Thursday night, the Secret Service said the inspector general’s claim about the lack of cooperation was “neither correct nor new.”
“To the contrary, the DHS OIG has previously alleged that its staff did not receive appropriate and timely access to materials due to counsel review. DHS has repeatedly and publicly debunked this claim, including in response to the OIG’s last two semiannual reports to Congress. It is not clear why the OIG is raising this matter again,” the statement said.
Committee members since Jan. 6 expressed concern after their meeting with Kufari about the differing version of events between the inspector general and the Secret Service and stressed that they wanted to hear from the agency itself.
“Now that we have the IG’s perspective on what happened. Now we have to talk to the Secret Service. And our expectation is to reach out to them directly,” Thompson said at the time. “One of the things we have to be sure of is that what the Secret Service is saying and what the IG is saying that these two issues are actually the same thing. So, now that we have that, we’re going to ask for some physical information. And we will make a decision ourselves.”
This story was updated with additional details on Saturday.
CNN’s Jamie Gangle, Whitney Wilde, Priscilla Alvarez and Caitlin Polanz contributed to this report.
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