Just when I thought no breaking news would happen until the primetime hearing on Thursday, comes this let-me-remind-you-that-we-are-not messing-around moment from the J6 committee.
Jan. 6 committee subpoenas Secret Service amid text message controversy
It's the first time the select committee has publicly announced the subpoena of an Executive Branch agency.
“The Select Committee seeks the relevant text messages, as well as any after action reports that have been issued in any and all divisions of the USSS pertaining or relating in any way to the events of January 6, 2021,” Chairman Bennie Thompson said in a letter accompanying the subpoena.
Committee members emerging from the DHS briefing said they were awaiting details about whether the inspector general will be able to obtain any of the missing messages.
“We’re interested in getting the texts from the Secret Service that happened on the fifth and sixth and we want to get the IG’s perspective on what he thought was going on,” Thompson told reporters Friday.
The subpoena, directed at agency director James Murray — who is retiring later this month — demands the production of records by July 19.
January 6 committee subpoenas Secret Service for records
"The Select Committee has been informed that the USSS erased text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021 as part of a 'device-replacement program.' In a statement issued July 14, 2022, the USSS stated that it 'began to reset its mobile phones to factory settings as part of a pre-planned, three-month system migration. In that process, data resident on some phones was lost.' However, according to that USSS statement,
'none of the texts it [DHS Office of Inspector General] was seeking had been lost in the migration,'" Thompson wrote.
"Accordingly, the Select Committee seeks the relevant text messages, as well as any after action reports that have been issued in any and all divisions of the USSS pertaining or relating in any way to the events of January 6, 2021," he continued.
Read more:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/15/politics/january-6-committee-subpoena-secret-service-records/index.html
The committee showed that they were determined to get the texts, despite the agency’s ‘new phone, who is this?’ response to the Inspector General’s request for the agency’s Jan.6 texts.
The chair of the Jan. 6 select committee on Thursday said the panel will try to ”reconstruct" deleted U.S. Secret Service text messages flagged by an agency watchdog.
Why it matters: The text messages were from Jan. 5 and 6 and may have contained evidence about key events related to the Capitol attack — the focus of the panel’s hearing next Thursday.[...]
- The agency — and in particular Anthony Ornato, an agent who also served as White House deputy chief of staff — was a central subject of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony to the panel last month.
www.axios.com/...
Cassidy Hutchinson’s explosive testimony put the agency under a spotlight.
Her testimony sparked a major battle in the country’s relentless culture wars, and she was smeared by the former White House occupant, who has refused to testify under oath to explain his actions leading up to January 6.
We have gone from ‘she said, they lied’ to ‘she said, they deleted’ to ‘she said, they’re subpoenaed’.