A member of the House Jan. 6 committee revealed the Secret Service “dumped hundreds of thousands of documents” on the panel investigating the 2021 riot at the Capitol on Tuesday.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) told MSNBC that the committee had been asking the Secret Service for the documents for “almost a year” but that they were only delivered on Tuesday morning. She also expressed concern about the actions of the Department of Homeland Security inspector general and said there are “troubling behavior patterns” emerging from the committee’s dealings with the Secret Service.
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“There are a lot of questions, and I have some concerns,” Lofgren said Tuesday when asked about the role of the Secret Service on Jan. 6.
“Not only erasing the text messages, but there is information that we’ve asked for, for almost a year, that is only recently been produced, and in some cases, what we got they knew that we had from another source,” Lofgren said, revealing that the Secret Service “dumped hundreds of thousands of documents on us this morning.”
Lofgren expounded on the missing text messages from members of the Secret Service that were apparently deleted around the time of the riot at the Capitol, expressing her concerns about reports that DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari ordered the agency to stop any internal investigations into the deleted texts. The DHS is the parent agency of the Secret Service.
“I’m also concerned about the actions of the inspector general. He sat on this stuff for months and months and months as well, and now he has ordered the department to stop the forensics analysis of the phones, which we need. We need that to happen,” Lofgren said.
House Jan. 6 committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) demanded on Tuesday that Cuffari step aside from the investigation into missing messages and a new inquiry head be appointed.
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Last week, Secret Service Director James Murray pledged that the agency will fully cooperate with the House Jan. 6 committee despite the uproar over the deleted text messages.
The text messages from the days around Jan. 6 could be key to verifying testimony provided to the committee by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who claimed that she heard an account about former President Donald Trump attempting to commandeer the presidential SUV vehicle and lunging at an agent on the day of the riot. Those claims have been denied by Trump.
