(Washington) The Secret Service, responsible in particular for the protection of the President of the United States, deleted text messages from several agents sent the day of the assault on Congress in Washington on January 6, 2021 by supporters of Donald Trump, according to a supervisory body.
Posted at 11:23 p.m.
Joseph Cuffari, Inspector General of the Department of National Security, said in a Thursday letter to congressional leaders that he had difficulty obtaining Secret Service records dating back to January 5 and 6, 2021.
These messages could be crucial to investigations by the House of Representatives and by the Department of Justice to determine whether the former Republican president and his close advisers encouraged the deadly assault on the Capitol, in an attempt to prevent the certification of the victory of his Democratic opponent Joe Biden in the November 2020 ballot.
Secret Service agents were with Mr. Trump that day and with Vice President Mike Pence, who had been hiding in the Capitol after pro-Trump activists called for him to be hanged.
A former White House employee testified on June 29 before the House Committee of Inquiry that Mr. Trump tried to force the Secret Service to take him to Congress to join his supporters there.
“The department has notified us that numerous messages from the United States Secret Service (USSS), from January 5 and 6, 2021, have been erased as part of a device replacement program,” Cuffari wrote in his mail, revealed by The Intercept and then published by Politico.
“The USSS erased these text messages after the OIG (Office of the Inspector General, editor’s note) requested the records of electronic communications” for the examination of the events of January 6, he continued.
Additionally, he said, the department dragged its feet in turning over other documents requested by the OIG.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi in a statement dismissed Cuffari’s accusations, saying the agents’ phones had been reset as part of a planned replacement program that began before the OIG request was made six weeks after the assault.
“The Secret Service reported to the (Office of the Inspector General) the loss of data from some phones, but confirmed to the OIG that none of the text messages they were looking for had been lost during this migration,” he added.