According to the Office of Inspector General Department of Homeland Security (OIG), the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) erased “text messages, from January 5 and 6, 2021.” The letter originally sent to the House and Senate Homeland Security Committees by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General states that the messages were erased during what the USSS called “a device-replacement program.”
Whether or not this is above board becomes even more questionable, according to OIG’s letter, when you consider that those erased text messages were “after OIG requested records of electronic communications from the USSS, as part of our evaluation of events at the Capitol on January 6.” On top of this, the letter reports that OIG inspectors have been stonewalled in their requests for “records of electronic communications” by the USSS.
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The Secret Service’s involvement in the events of Jan. 6, 2021 and attempted coup d’etat have been under scrutiny for some time now. Vice President Mike Pence, who was key to Trump and “constitutional scholar” and coup architect John Eastman’s strategy, refused to leave the Capitol grounds when pressed by Secret Service.
The letter was first reported on by The Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein. Klippenstein also highlights exactly why the Secret Service’s text messages are potentially important to understand what exactly was happening behind the scenes on Jan. 6.
“People need to understand that if Pence had listened to the Secret Service and fled the Capitol, this could have turned out a whole lot worse,” a congressional official not authorized to speak publicly told The Intercept. “It could’ve been a successful coup, not just an attempted one.”
A spokesperson for the OIG would not comment on “ongoing reviews.”
UPDATE: The U.S. Secret Service has put out an official Statement. It’s very defensive and utterly preposterous.
“First, in January 2021, before any inspection was opened by OlG on this subject, the Secret Service 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.”
We should see someone explain this in front of the public and under oath. The idea that you could be so incompetent that you lose the single most important pieces of data in arguably the worst security scenario we have had in over two decades—and not have digital information backed up? That’s grounds for all kinds of people being fired, at the very least.
But that’s not what has happened here. That data is somewhere. Ask your provider.
