The US House committee investigating the Capitol Hill attack issued a subpoena to the Secret Service, marking the first time the panel has done so publicly for an executive branch agency.
Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the committee, wrote in a letter Friday to Secret Service Director James Murray that the panel is seeking Secret Service text messages from Jan. 2021 and reiterated three previous requests for information.
“The Select Committee has been informed that the USSS (US Secret Service) deleted text messages from January 5th and 6th, 2021 as part of a ‘device replacement program’. In a statement issued on July 14, the USSS stated that it ‘began resetting their cell phones to factory settings as part of a pre-planned three-month system migration. In this process, data residing on some phones was lost. ‘ However, according to this USSS statement, ‘none of the texts were lost in the migration,'” Thompson wrote.
“Accordingly, the Select Committee seeks out the relevant text messages as well as any after-action reports that have been issued in any and all divisions of the USSS belonging to or related in any way to the events of January 6, 2021,” he added.
The committee planned to contact Secret Service officials to inquire about deleted text messages from the day of the US Capitol attack and the day before, including the agency’s process to clean up files, Thompson previously told CNN .
Last week, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General Joseph Cuffari told the committee at a briefing that the Secret Service did not conduct its own after-action review on Jan. rely on the inspector general’s investigation, according to one source. The Secret Service, Cuffari told the panel, did not fully cooperate with his investigation.
Thompson confirmed the inspector general’s remarks, telling the CNN : “Well, they’re not fully cooperating” and that the panel “had limited involvement with the Secret Service.”
“We’re going to continue with some additional involvement now that we’ve met with Cuffari,” the Democrat said, adding that the committee would work “to try to see if these texts can be redeemed.”
The U.S. Secret Service deleted text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, shortly after they were requested by oversight officials investigating the agency’s response to the Capitol riot, according to a letter delivered to the House select committee investigating the insurrection.
The document, originally sent to the House and Senate Homeland Security Committee by Cuffari, said the messages were deleted from the system as part of a device replacement program after the watchdog asked the agency for records related to its electronic communications. .
“First, the Department notified us that many USSS text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021 were deleted as part of a device replacement program. The USSS deleted these text messages after they requested electronic communications records as part of our assessment of the events on Capitol Hill on January 6,” Cuffari said.
“Second, DHS personnel repeatedly told inspectors that they were not allowed to provide records and that these records first needed to be reviewed by DHS attorneys,” Cuffari added. “This review led to delays of weeks and created confusion over whether all records were produced.”
A DHS employee provided the CNN a timeline of when the inspector general was informed by the Secret Service of the lost information caused by the data transfer. In a statement, the Secret Service said the information was first requested on February 26, 2021, but did not specify when the agency acknowledged the issue.
According to the DHS official, the Secret Service notified Cuffari of the migration issue on multiple occasions, starting on May 4, 2021, then again on December 14, 2021, and in February 2022.
In the statement, the Secret Service said the inspector general’s claim of lack of cooperation “is neither correct nor new”.
“On the contrary, DHS previously claimed that its employees were not given appropriate and timely access to the materials due to attorney review. DHS has repeatedly and publicly debunked this claim, including in response to the last two semiannual reports to Congress. It is unclear why this issue is being raised again,” the statement said.
Members of the January 6 committee expressed concern after their meeting with Cuffari about the different version of events between the inspector general and the Secret Service and emphasized that they wanted to hear from the agency itself.
“Now that we have the inspector’s view of what happened, we need to speak to the Secret Service. Our expectation is to contact them directly,” Thompson said at the time.
Source: CNN Brasil
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