The Secret Service is poised to tell the House January 6 committee that additional text messages that may have been relevant to its agents’ interactions with then-president Trump on the day of the Capitol riot are lost and cannot be recovered.
I detailed last week that the agency had told Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari of the Department of Homeland Security (of which the U.S. Secret Service is a component) that text messages had been irretrievably erased, even though Cuffari had requested that they be preserved and provided to him. The USSS pushed back against these assertions, conceding that it had lost some data as part of a long-planned “system migration,” but maintaining that no texts pertinent to investigations of the Capitol riot were lost.
Last Friday (July 15), the January 6 committee issued a subpoena, demanding production of records related to any erased texts from January 5 and 6, 2021. This afternoon, the Washington Post has reported that the USSS will tell the committee that it has no new, responsive information to share. The Post report relies on an unidentified “senior official briefed on the matter” — it is unclear whether this “senior official” is from the USSS, Homeland Security, the January 6 committee, or some other government component. The Post also says it spoke with two unidentified “people familiar with the Secret Service communications system.”
The USSS is said to have spent four days reviewing all its communications databases. While it will provide thousands of records to the committee, they essentially overlap with what was previously disclosed to Cuffari.
The USSS reportedly claims that it proceeded in mid-January 2021 (i.e., days after the riot) with an “agencywide reset of staff telephones” that had been in the works for months. Secret Service agents were instructed that, prior to the reset, they were to upload to an internal agency drive any stored text messages related to government business. The Post reports that “many agents appear not to have done so.” Once the reset of telephones took place, any stored texts that had not been uploaded were deleted irrevocably.
The controversy over lost texts comes in the aftermath of testimony before the January 6 committee by former White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson. She related that she’d been told by two Secret Service agents — Tony Ornato, who ran security at the Trump White House, and Robert Engel, who ran Trump’s personal security detail — that Trump had gotten into a minor physical altercation with Engel after trying to grab the steering wheel of the Secret Service SUV in which he was driven from the Ellipse.
In his speech at the Ellipse, Trump had told the audience he would accompany them to the Capitol to protest Congress’s counting of state-certified electoral votes, which would result in Joe Biden’s being acknowledged as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Trump became angry when Engel and other agents refused to take him to the Capitol because doing so would have been too dangerous. They instead returned him to the West Wing of the White House, where Hutchinson said she subsequently heard the story about the skirmish from Ornato, in Engel’s presence.
Although Hutchinson did not see the skirmish, and although the committee’s previous interviews with Ornato and Engel adduced nothing about such a skirmish, the committee apparently did not try to corroborate Hutchinson’s version of events by checking with Ornato and Engel before eliciting her testimony at the nationally televised hearing. The committee has thus far declined to release transcripts or video of its interviews of Ornato and Engel.
After Hutchinson’s public testimony, media reports based on unidentified sources said to be close to the agents stated that (a) Engel and the unidentified driver of the Secret Service SUV denied that a physical altercation with President Trump had happened, and (b) Ornato denied having told Hutchinson that it happened. Nevertheless, there has been no public, on-the-record denial of Hutchinson’s testimony by those involved. Moreover, there has been no reported disagreement with Hutchinson’s testimony that Trump was irate about not being taken to the Capitol — only with her testimony that his anger led to a physical encounter.
It was anticipated that text traffic among Secret Service personnel might shed light on the subject. Apparently not.
Meantime, it has been reported that the January 6 committee’s chairman, Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.) has tested positive for Covid. As of now, the committee indicates that this will not alter its plan for a prime-time session this Thursday evening.