The Jan. 6 committee is subpoenaing records from the Secret Service after learning the agency didn’t conduct its own after-action review following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and is not fully cooperating with the committee.
Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said the committee is seeking information about text messages from Jan. 5 and 6 that were reportedly deleted. Joseph Cuffari, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, met behind closed doors with the Jan. 6 committee on Friday, according to CNN. Cuffari told the panel that it hadn’t received full access to personnel and records. Before going to talk with the committee, Cuffari tried to tell his boss, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, about the lack of cooperation.
“Well, they have not been fully cooperating,” Thompson told CNN. “We’ve had limited engagement with Secret Service. We’ll follow up with some additional engagement now that we’ve met with the IG.”
SECRET SERVICE DELETED JAN. 6 TEXT MESSAGES: WATCHDOG
The role Secret Service agents played in the Jan. 6 riot has come to the top of the list of concerns for the panel after a watchdog reported this week that agents deleted text messages that were sent on Jan. 5 and 6 after officials requested to see them.
On Friday night, Thompson raised concerns about the “device replacement program” the Secret Service said was the reason why some messages had been deleted, as well as the program’s timing, in a letter to Secret Service Director James Murray.
“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.'” Thompson wrote. “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.'”
Cuffari raised the problem of the deleted messages in a letter to the House and Senate Homeland Security committees on Wednesday. The messages were lost in the course of the aforesaid device replacement program that began before Cuffari’s office requested the messages, according to the Secret Service, but there is still some debate about whether the texts can be retrieved.
After meeting with Cuffari on Friday, Thompson also said the committee is planning to reach out to the Secret Service and get their interpretation of events.
“Now that we have the IG’s view of what has happened. We now need to talk to the Secret Service. And our expectation is to reach out to them directly,” Thompson told the outlet. “One of the things we have to make sure is that what Secret Service is saying and what the IG is saying, that those two issues are in fact one and the same. And so now that we have it, we’ll ask for the physical information. And we’ll make a decision ourselves.”
The Secret Service is adamant it has cooperated with every inspector it has worked with, saying any “insinuation” that messages were deleted in response to a request rather than because the agency was undergoing a technology transition is false.
“First, in January 2021, before any inspection was opened by OIG on this subject, USSS 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,” said Anthony Guglielmi, chief of communications for the Secret Service, in an email to the Washington Examiner. “DHS OIG requested electronic communications for the first time on Feb. 26, 2021, after the migration was well under way.”
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This isn’t the first time there has been a conflict between the Secret Service and the Jan. 6 committee.
After the bombshell testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson when she relayed a story about then-President Donald Trump grabbing the wheel of an SUV leaving his speech at the White House Ellipse on Jan. 6, the agency said it was never contacted before Hutchinson’s testimony. However, following her public testimony, the agency said it would respond “on the record” about the incident.
