A report published Wednesday evening raises new questions about the watchdog agency that alerted Congress to vanishing Secret Service text messages around the time of the Capitol riot.
Sources told the Washington Post that the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of the Secret Service, knew in February that the cellphone texts had been erased but did not alert Congress for months. DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari informed two House committees just last week that many messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol riot, had been erased “as part of a device-replacement program.”
SECRET SERVICE PROVIDED JUST ONE TEXT MESSAGE AFTER REQUEST FOR MONTH’S WORTH
A public alert about the Secret Service and other department divisions about them stonewalling requests for records related to the Capitol riot was prepared by the watchdog agency in October but never sent out, according to the report, which cited “two whistleblowers” who have worked with Cuffari. The report credits a former employee who got in contact with Project On Government Oversight, an independent government-accountability group, which then shared that information with congressional staff, who corroborated it with another person.
Investigators want to gain access to these text messages because they could offer insight into what former President Donald Trump was doing before, during, and after the Capitol riot.
The report said Cuffari’s office did not directly respond to the allegations about the alert, but it did share concerns about the Secret Service and others delaying its investigation into the Capitol riot in semiannual reports to Congress, though text messages were not mentioned. The Washington Examiner reached out to the DHS inspector general for comment on the report.
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Cuffari issued a request in June 2021 for text messages sent between 24 Secret Service members between Dec. 7, 2020, and Jan. 8, 2021, Ronald Rowe, assistant director for the Office of Intergovernmental and Legislative Affairs, wrote in a letter to the Jan. 6 committee. The Secret Service was only able to provide a single text exchange to the inspector general, according to the letter.
The National Archives called on the Secret Service on Tuesday to investigate whether the messages were “improperly deleted,” giving officials 30 days to detail their findings. Jan. 6 committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney (R-WY) issued a joint statement Thursday that said the Secret Service was providing the panel records following a subpoena but raised “concerns about a system migration that we have been told resulted in the erasure of Secret Service cell phone data” and noted that “the procedure for preserving content prior to this purge appears to have been contrary to federal records retention requirements and may represent a possible violation of the Federal Records Act.”
