Washington:
The U.S. Secret Service, the law enforcement agency protecting the president, has deleted agents’ text messages sent during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a government watchdog said in a letter published Thursday.
Joseph Cuffari, the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, told Congress in Wednesday’s letter that as of Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, his office has had trouble getting intelligence data.
The reports could be crucial to the House of Representatives and Justice Department investigations into whether Donald Trump and his closest advisers encouraged the deadly rebellion of the former president’s supporters in the US Capitol, which aimed to prevent Democratic rival Joe Biden’s certification as the winner of the November 2020 election.
Secret Service agents were with Trump on the day of the uprising and also with Vice President Mike Pence, who was hiding in the Capitol after pro-Trump rioters called for him to be hanged.
On June 29, a former White House staffer told the Jan. 6 investigation that Trump had tried to force the Secret Service to take him to the Capitol to join his supporters that day.
“The Department has informed us that many US Secret Service (USSS) text messages dated January 5 and 6, 2021, have been deleted as part of a device replacement program,” Cuffari wrote in the letter sent to the agency. was first reported by The Intercept and later published by Politico.
“The USSS deleted those text messages after the OIG requested electronic communications records” for a Jan. 6 review, he said, referring to the inspector general’s office.
In addition, he said, the department has stopped providing other data to the OIG.
In a statement, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi rejected the inspector general’s claim.
He said the agents’ phones were wiped as part of a planned replacement program that began before the OIG requested the information six weeks after the riot.
“The Secret Service notified DHS OIG of the loss of data from certain phones, but confirmed to OIG that none of the texts it sought were lost during the migration,” he said.
Cuffari’s letter was addressed to the leaders of the Senate and Household Security Committees.
The chair of the House Homeland Security committee is Representative Bennie Thompson, who is also the chair of the House committee investigating Jan. 6.
Their investigation has sought to show that Trump knowingly instigated the uprising as an attempted “coup”.
The Secret Service has been criticized for not adequately anticipating the threat of violent action from armed Trump supporters on Jan. 6.
Trump had appointed a senior Secret Service official at the time, Tony Ornato, his personal deputy chief of staff.
Ornato has denied the statement former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson gave to the Jan. 6 committee that Trump tried to force the Secret Service to take him to the Capitol as his supporters gathered at the building, the seat of the U.S. legislature. power.
But other White House officials have supported Hutchinson’s story.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)