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The US Secret Service, the law enforcement agency protecting the president, deleted agents’ text messages sent during the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, a government watchdog said in a letter released Thursday.
Joseph Cuffari, the inspector general for Homeland Security, told Congress in Wednesday’s letter that his office was having difficulty obtaining Secret Service records for January 5 and 6, 2021.
The messages could be crucial to House and Justice Department investigations into whether Donald Trump and his close advisers encouraged the deadly uprising by the former president’s supporters in the US Capitol aimed at threatening Democratic rival Joe Biden’s certification as a Winner to prevent the November 2020 election.
Secret Service agents were with Trump on the day of the riot and also with Vice President Mike Pence, who was in hiding in the Capitol after pro-Trump rioters called for his hanging.
On June 29, a former White House staffer told the January 6 House Inquiry that Trump was trying to force the Secret Service to take him to the Capitol that day to join his supporters.
“The Department has informed us that many United States Secret Service (USSS) text messages dated January 5 and 6, 2021 were deleted as part of an equipment replacement program,” Cuffari wrote in the letter, first reported by The Intercept and later by Politico was released.
“The USSS deleted these text messages after the OIG requested records of the electronic communications,” he said for a Jan. 6 review, citing the Office of the Inspector General.
In addition, he said, the department has stopped providing other records to the OIG.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi denied the inspector general’s allegation in a statement.
He said the agents’ phones would be wiped as part of a planned replacement program that began before the OIG requested the information six weeks after the riot.
“The Secret Service notified the DHS OIG that certain phone data was lost, but confirmed to the OIG that none of the requested text was lost in the migration,” he said.
Cuffari’s letter was addressed to the chairmen of the Senate and House Homeland Security Committees.
The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee is Rep. Bennie Thompson, who is also the chairman of the House committee investigating January 6th.
Their investigation has attempted to show that Trump knowingly instigated the uprising as an attempted “coup.”
The intelligence agency has been criticized for failing to adequately anticipate the threat posed by the violent action by armed Trump supporters on Jan. 6.
At the time, Trump had appointed a senior intelligence official, Tony Ornato, as his personal deputy chief of staff.
Ornato has denied former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s report to the committee Jan. 6 that Trump tried to force the Secret Service to drive him to the Capitol as his supporters gathered inside the building, the seat of the US Legislature .
But other White House officials at the time supported Hutchinson’s story.
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