The standoff between Jan. 6 investigators and the Secret Service will reach a critical point Tuesday, when the panel looking into the Capitol riot expects to receive a set of agency text messages that could shed new light on former President Trump’s actions that day. .
The transfer, if it goes through, follows several days of confusion and finger-pointing over elusive messages that a government watchdog told the committee were “deleted” by the Secret Service — only to have the agency flatly deny the allegation.
The allegation prompted the House Select Committee to subpoena the Secret Service for the texts late Friday, just hours after the group met with Joseph Kuffari, inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security.
Kufari, a Trump appointee, had sent a letter to the committee earlier this week saying the agency had deleted the text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021 “as part of a device replacement program.” The deletion came “after the OIG [Office of Inspector General] requested records of electronic communications” from the agency, Kufari wrote.
Investigators since Jan. 6 have accused Trump of instigating the attack on the Capitol in an attempt to cling to power after his election defeat, and they are eager to learn whether the “deleted” messages may reveal new details about Trump’s actions and intentions surrounding the riot.
The focus on the Secret Service has taken on new urgency since last month, when a former senior West Wing aide testified about a confrontation between Trump and his security officials on Jan. 6 after the president was informed he would not be flown to the Capitol to join to the protest there. The aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, supplied this explosive account secondhand, and some of the agents involved have since disputed it, though not directly.
Given the discrepancies, the select committee sought to cast a wide net when it came to the Secret Service, which on Jan. 6 protected not only Trump but also his Vice President, Mike Pence, who was a key target of the violent mob that stormed the Capitol.
Their subpoena gave the agency until Tuesday morning to deliver the disputed messages.
“There was a statement made by the department’s spokesperson that said it’s not true, it’s not fair, and that they actually had relevant texts,” said Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) in a Sunday appearance on “This Week ” on ABC, citing the agency’s rebuttal of Cuffari’s account. “And we say, ‘OK, if you’ve got them, we need them.’ “
“And we expect to have them by this Tuesday. So we’ll see,” added Lofgren, a member of the House committee on Jan. 6.
Amid Friday’s subpoena, the Tuesday deadline is the fastest turnaround the group has requested on one of its subpoenas, a sign lawmakers are eager to resolve the mystery surrounding the messages as the public hearing phase of the investigation winds down.
Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said the agency would meet the 10 a.m. deadline Tuesday, but that much of what it had to turn over would repeat what it had already shared with the committee.
He denied the existence of any “hidden messages” the agency was hiding or anything else officials were “keeping” from the panel.
“We will respond to all five sections of the subpoena in detail,” Guglielmi told The Hill Monday, going through a list of what was provided to investigators.
“We also provided almost 800,000 documents, emails, radio broadcasts, planning records, operational plans, Microsoft Teams chat messages — we provided all of those things. We will provide all this. We will respond to each individual response to the committee’s subpoena to the best of our physical ability.
The Secret Service last week said Cuffari’s allegations were categorically false and described the data loss as part of a “pre-planned quarterly system migration”.
“In the process, data stored on some phones was lost,” the agency said at the time.
Guglielmi said Secret Service agents have been advised to upload data from their phones, but because the agency avoids text messages for security reasons, there is little to share.
“It’s hard for people to understand, but we don’t communicate via text. It is in policy not to conduct business by text,” he said.
“There is no reason to claim that the texts are lost. I mean, how do you know these people were texting? They were told to upload their official records and they did. That’s partly what we’re going to report to the committee, all the data that we have. People say messages have been lost. How do you know messages have been sent?’
During the closed-door meeting on Friday, Kufari claimed that the messages had been lost and expressed optimism that there might be some way to recover them using various forensic tools, according to The Guardian.
As lawmakers on the committee made the rounds on Sunday’s talk shows, many stressed that the Secret Service may be in violation of federal records laws if it is unable to preserve data, let alone at such a critical time.
“This is what we need to get to the bottom of,” said Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“There is a requirement that federal agencies maintain records,” she continued. “An agency that was such a key part of a critical event in our history — one would assume that they would have done everything they could to preserve those records, to analyze them to determine what things went right or went wrong that day.”
Lofgren said the commission simply needed “all the texts from the 5th and 6th.”
“I was shocked to hear that they didn’t back up their data before resetting their iPhones. This is crazy. I don’t know why that would be,” she said.
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“But we need to get that information to get the full picture.”
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), another member of the committee, also expressed disbelief that the Secret Service would delete all communications around Jan. 6, blasting the agency for what he characterized as “contradictory” explanations.
“It’s pretty crazy, to say the least, that the Secret Service would actually delete everything related to one of the most infamous days in American history,” he said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” “Especially when it comes to the role of the Secret Service.”
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