There seems to be a certain amount of surprise in some quarters that Secret Service texts, Homeland Security texts, and now DOD messages have all gone missing, all of them from around January 6.
Really? Surprise?
It’s almost as though anything that took place more than 5 minutes ago just disappears from common memory.
Has everyone forgotten Watergate, and how one of the things that broke it wide open was the revelation that Richard M. Nixon had been secretly recording things in the White House?
One of the more notable elements of that story was the 18 ½ minute gap that was mysteriously erased from one of the tapes. There’s still no convincing explanation for how it happened or what might have been on there.
But that was Nixon.
To talk about all the things that took place on Ronald Reagan’s watch that they tried to keep out of the spotlight would take multiple books. And there’s a reason George H.W. Bush was handing out strategic presidential pardons on his way out of office.
George W. Bush took things to an entirely new level: 22 million emails went missing on his watch. The party that had an extended hissy-fit over Hillary Clinton’s emails had no shame when it was their turn.
Clinton's email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House "lost" 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America's recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.
Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. "It's about as amazing a double standard as you can get," says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. "If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers' emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton's emails set up on a private DNC server?"
Astonishingly, the press seems to have overlooked all this when it was Hillary Clinton’s turn in the barrel. /s
So, it should come as no surprise that critical information has mysteriously evaporated from the time Donald Trump was instigating a coup attempt. It’s a Republican reflex — one Trump was already primed to adopt after decades of duplicitous tax filings and other tactics. Forget “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about.” The GOP principle is “If they can’t prove anything, you can get away with whatever you want.”
Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified how Trump ran his business empire like a mob boss, speaking in code, never directly saying things that might be considered actionable.
In Cohen’s scathing testimony at a House committee hearing, he repeatedly described Trump, the onetime head of a family business, like a mob boss minus the body count: quick to bully and expecting others to do his dirty work. Cohen described himself as a consigliere, telling lawmakers he did Trump’s bidding for years, intimidating maybe 500 people and lying to scores, including the first lady. But Trump never directly told him to do it, he said.
“He doesn’t give you questions, he doesn’t give you orders,” Cohen said. “He speaks in a code, and I understand the code because I’ve been around him for a decade.”
...In his book “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership,” former FBI director James Comey said he got the sinking feeling that Trump’s operation functioned like the mob. Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe spun a similar story, and a former agent and former federal prosecutor tweeted Wednesday that Trump’s tactics as detailed by Cohen sure felt a lot like the mafia.
There’s even a “Godfather: Part II” reference in the indictment by the special prosecutor investigating Trump’s possible ties to Russia. Trump confidant Roger Stone told an associate to pull a “Frank Pentangeli” before a House committee, the indictment says. In the film, Pentangeli, an associate of the Corleone crime family, lies to protect the family during congressional testimony.
Trump certainly had a thing about not leaving a paper trail. And Mark Meadows certainly has some questions to answer. Given how Trump operates and the kind of people he surrounds himself with, it is surprising there’s any record of anything.
But… lies and missing records is a Republican tradition after all. You’d think people might remember that by now.
UPDATE: Charlie Pierce brings the snark:
What were once vices are now habi…well, they’re still vices, but they do become pretty damn habitual. From the Washington Post:
Court records published on the website of the watchdog group American Oversight indicate that the Pentagon “wiped” the government-issued phones of senior Defense Department and Army officials who were in charge of mobilizing the National Guard to respond to the Capitol attack, including then-acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller and then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy. The erasing apparently was done in keeping with Defense Department and Army policy for departing employees, according to filings that state: “the text messages were not preserved.”
…[It] also makes the Defense Department the latest known part of the federal government, including the Secret Service and other parts of the Department of Homeland Security, to have deleted records that could have helped investigators piece together what happened on Jan. 6 — and the degree to which President Donald Trump was responsible for delays in responding.
I mean, come on, people. Give us a little credit. Try a little harder. Lean into the cover-up. The Watergate crooks had Tony Ulasewicz, running from one phone booth to another, a trolley conductor’s coin dispenser on his belt, delivering the hush money to the burglars. The Iran-Contra scoundrels had Fawn Hall, smuggling incriminating documents out of Ollie North’s office in her lingerie and, in her own words, “going beyond the written law.” Those were bag persons with style. What we have here, at best, is a bunch of apparatchiks, from several government agencies, all simply waiting for their phones to get wiped. At worst, we have the most boringly obvious obstruction of justice in American political history...
UPDATE: Spocko speculates that the missing messages may not be as missing as some people would like to desperately hope believe.
Writing over at Digby’s Place, Spocko has some interesting thoughts on what might be going on with stories about all of the January 6 messages that were supposedly wiped:
I think the J6 committees already knows the contents of the missing texts from the Secret Service, DHS and now the DoD. Texts of top Trump officials in the Department of Defense wiped. The “missing texts” investigation is designed to reveal people involved in the cover up. It’s a setup to implicate Trumpers embedded in government. And it’s working, it’s already exposed actions and non-actions taken by Trump appointed Inspector General, Joseph Cuffari. Monday, Reps. Bennie Thompson and Carolyn Maloney ( said they also have new evidence the inspector general’s office stopped trying to recover the missing records over a year ago. Link
emphasis added
...The BS reasons given that the texts are missing are BS. However, they are used to give some people an out if they come forward with more information. (Remember, the J6 committee wants the information, not necessarily to prosecute everyone for all their crimes. That’s the DoJ’s job.)
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who KNOWS what’s in the texts AND KNOWS that the reasons given they disappeared are BS. The committee is giving people an excuse to come forward now and cut a deal. They are SAYING the texts were deleted and missing. They are NOT saying there is no way to ever know what is in those texts. They are expecting people to come forward and say things like “I deleted the texts, but now I remember who told me to.” Or “I really DID send most of them in, but I didn’t send in the encrypted ones on my personal phone. Here they are now.”
...I talked to Matt Binder on his podcast Doomed last night. (Link. I start at 1:46.) I asked if he believed the texts were really deleted. He thought they were because of who was doing this and their technical sophistication. I laughed, I shouldn’t have, because he’s correct. The Secret Service DOES have that level of technical sophistication. What I was laughing about was how often people only look in their area of expertise and don’t consider others. *I’m guilty of the same bias. I know about the technical reasons it’s hard to delete texts everywhere AND I pointed out that other agencies, like the NSA, probably have copies. But then Glenn Kirschner pointed out I didn’t even need to go that far!
Cooperating witnesses have testified under oath about their texts
The J6 committee has interviewed over 1,000 witnesses–for over a year. Most of them cooperated. Cooperating witnesses turn over texts, from their private phones and messages sent on encrypted services.
Those who don’t take the deal to provide information will be sent to the DOJ, where they might cut deals to avoid prosecution there. Some will be charged with obstructing justice, others will have the charges dropped if they cooperate.
Read the whole thing. If this is what’s actually going on, this could really get interesting.
Make it so!