WASHINGTON — The Senate’s No. 2 Democrat on Wednesday called for an inspector general investigation into missing text messages from senior Defense Department officials in the Trump administration related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he is sending a letter to Sean O’Donnell, the Defense Department’s inspector general, requesting an investigation into the disappearance of text messages from the phones of at least five former Trump administration officials, including Christopher S. Miller, Acting Secretary of Defense; Kash Patel, Pentagon chief of staff; and Ryan D. McCarthy, Secretary of the Army.
Officials were involved in discussions about sending the National Guard to the Capitol during the mob violence.
“The disappearance of this critical information could jeopardize efforts to learn the full truth about January 6,” Mr. Durbin said in a statement. “I don’t know if the failure to preserve these critical government texts from January 6 is the result of bad faith, staggering incompetence or outdated records management policies, but we need to get to the bottom of it.”
A spokeswoman for the inspector general said he was awaiting Mr Durbin’s letter and would “review the letter once we receive it”.
Key takeaways from the January 6 hearings
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Litigation against Trump. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack laid out a comprehensive account of the efforts of President Donald J. Trump to cancel the 2020 election. Here are the main themes that have come out of eight public hearings so far:
Mr. Durbin’s call for an investigation into the missing Pentagon texts came on the same day that the Justice Department filed a civil suit against a former White House adviser to Mr. Trump, Peter Navarro, saying that Mr. Navarro had not kept messages from a private e-mail address that he used for government work.
In the suit, the Justice Department said it had contacted Mr. Navarro about providing the emails, but that he had refused to provide the records “in the absence of immunity for the act of returning such documents.”
Mr. Navarro was indicted in June on two counts of contempt of Congress after he failed to comply with a Jan. 6 subpoena from a House committee seeking his testimony and documents.
Mr. Navarro’s lawyers, John Irving and John Rowley, said he had “never refused to provide records to the government.”
“As detailed in our latest letter to the records, Mr. Navarro has instructed his attorneys to preserve all such records, and he expects the government to follow standard processes in good faith to allow him to produce records,” the attorneys said in a statement. “Instead, the government chose to file its case today.”
In the case of the missing Pentagon texts, Mr. Durbin wrote to the inspector general a day after the watchdog group American Oversight sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland calling for an investigation. CNN previously reported on the agency’s missing texts.
American Oversight discovered the problem in March through litigation over the Defense Department’s response to public records requests it filed in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. In a lawsuit, attorneys for the Defense Department and the military told the group, that the government cannot create certain communications because when an administration employee leaves office, “he or she surrenders the government-issued phone and the phone is wiped.”
“For those trustees who are no longer with the agency, the text messages were not preserved,” the attorneys wrote, though they added that they would try to retrieve the texts through other means.
American Oversight sought communications from senior officials with Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on January 6.
The group specifically requested Mr. Miller’s communications; Mr. Patel; Mr. McCarthy; Paul Ney, Chief Counsel, Department of Defense; General James McConville, Army Chief of Staff; James E. McPherson, General Counsel of the Army; and Lt. Gen. Walter E. Piatt, director of the Army Staff.
Mr. Miller, Mr. Patel, Mr. Ney, Mr. McCarthy and Mr. McPherson all left the Defense Department or the military by the end of the Trump administration.
Mr. Durbin’s letter came after he urged Mr. Garland last week to take over an investigation into missing Department of Homeland Security text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, including those on the phones of Secret Service agents. Also missing were the texts of Mr. Trump’s homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf, and Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, his deputy.
Two top House Democrats also called on two officials from the Department of Homeland Security’s independent watchdog to testify before Congress about the agency’s handling of the missing Secret Service texts since Jan. 6, accusing their office of engaging in a cover-up.
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