Secret Service Wiped Jan. 6 Insurrection Texts And The DHS Inspector General Helped Cover It Up

Failures

from the all-this-hiding-must-mean-something-to-fear dept

Congressional hearings into the January 6, 2021 raid of the US Capitol building continue, focusing on the actions of Donald Trump and members of his administration as they sought to have Trump’s loss turned into a win.

Congressional investigators are looking into the possible involvement of Trump and Pence’s security teams. But subpoenaed communications from targeted Secret Service members have simply disappeared, something that was first reported early last month. Here’s Ken Klippenstein writing for The Intercept.

The Secret Service erased text messages from January 5 and January 6, 2021, according to a letter given to the January 6 committee and reviewed by The Intercept. The letter was originally sent by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General to the House and Senate homeland security committees. Though the Secret Service maintains that the text messages were lost as a result of a “device-replacement program,” the letter says the erasure took place shortly after oversight officials requested the agency’s electronic communications.

The Secret Service denied the texts were deleted after they had been requested by the DHS IG.

In a statement to the Washington Post, Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi disputed the timeline, saying that some electronic communications had been deleted in January, while the Inspector General made its request in February.

This may be true but it’s not all that helpful. Supposedly the texts were wiped as part of “planned data migration” that occurred on January 27, 2021. The thing about a “data migration” is that data is supposed to “migrate,” not vanish.

And plenty of people, including the DHS itself, had prior notice these texts would need to be preserved. In addition to requests from the National Archives, the chairs of four House Committees informed the DHS (which oversees the Secret Service) and “other relevant agencies” to preserve records related to the January 6 events.

Nine days after this, the Secret Service sent a reminder to employees about the planned data migration, putting them on notice it was up to employees to ensure all data was backed up. This obviously didn’t happen. Whether this was carelessness or something more deliberate remains to be seen.

No one seems to know exactly when the Secret Service discovered the messages were irretrievable, but DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari knew for months the US Secret Service was not cooperating with the IG’s investigation into the missing tests. But he apparently decided this was something congressional investigators didn’t need to know about.

A memo [PDF] that was very selectively quoted (two sentences total) by the DHS IG has been obtained by the Project on Government Oversight. It contains five paragraphs vetted and approved for release by Office of the Inspector General’s attorneys — five paragraphs that would have let congressional investigators know the Secret Service was not being cooperative. Instead, the IG decided to cover this up.

Inspector General Joseph Cuffari never sent this detailed alert. Instead, the records show that Cuffari not only failed to alert Congress in a timely way about the erased texts, but failed to adopt his staff’s explicit recommendations that he do so.

His office had known of the missing texts for weeks, if not longer, at this point. According to a key paragraph of the April 1 alert, which is not public and appears for the first time here:

“On February 23, 2022—more than 2 months after OIG renewed its requests for select Secret Service employees’ text messages—Secret Service claimed inability to extract text message content due to an April 2021 mobile phone system migration, which wiped all data.”

That unsent paragraph continues:

“Secret Service caused significant delay by not clearly communicating this highly relevant information at the outset of its exchanges with OIG during this reporting period. Moreover, Secret Service has not explained why it did not preserve the texts prior to the migration.”

As POGO points out, this refusal to forward this report left congressional investigators in the dark, forced to piece together the problem with the missing Secret Service texts by dealing with two uncooperative entities, the Secret Service and the DHS Inspector General’s office. Well, actually just the DHS Inspector General himself, who was being urged to inform Congress about the Secret Service’s obstruction of the IG’s investigation.

Instead, IG Cuffari waited more than three months to inform Congress that the Secret Service had failed to preserve the texts investigators sought, even as he was pressed to do so by other DHS investigators. And, as was noted earlier, Cuffari had known about the botched migration and missing texts since May of last year, but he chose not to make this information public for another 13 months.

The version that made its way to Congress after massaging by Cuffari is, in retrospect, more about what’s missing than what’s actually there.

[T]he June report contained only two sentences about delayed access to Secret Service records and the January 6 review, and neither mentioned that the agency had admitted to erasing the messages.

Which is all part of a larger DHS Inspector General Office problem: Inspector General Cuffari, who is now facing calls to recuse himself from January 6-related investigations.

Earlier reporting by POGO found that Cuffari had also declined to inform Congress in the fall of 2021 about the Secret Service’s stonewalling access to information related to January 6, despite extensive efforts by multiple attorneys in his office to produce a detailed, six-page management alert about the problem.

[…]

POGO also recently obtained documentation that shows Cuffari’s office never told Congress it had known about then-Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf and then-Acting DHS Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli’s deleted texts for over five months.

Self-preservation appears to be the name of the game. A planned data migration made it easy for Secret Service agents, who may have been supportive of Trump’s desire to overturn the election results, to simply allow damning texts to be migrated out of existence. And the DHS Inspector General’s unwillingness to go after Trump administration officials has resulted in him trying to save himself by misleading Congress repeatedly.

Filed Under: dhs, inspector general, january 6th, joseph cuffari, secret service, text messages