The letter adds to growing tension between the Secret Service and the DHS inspector general over the possible missing text messages, which the House Select Committee is seeking as part of its investigation into the actions and movements of former President Donald Trump on 6 January 2021. . “To ensure the integrity of our investigation, the USSS should not engage in further investigative activities related to the collection and preservation of the evidence listed above,” DHS Deputy Inspector General Gladys Ayala wrote in a letter to her director Secret Service agent James Murray on Wednesday night. . “This includes immediately refraining from interviewing potential witnesses, collecting devices or taking any other action that would interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation.” The inspector general wrote that the Secret Service should explain what interviews had already been conducted about the text messages, along with “the scope of the questioning and what, if any, warnings were given to witnesses.” The inspector general told the Secret Service to respond by Monday. The new letter comes after the Secret Service was able to provide only one text message to the inspector general, who had requested a month’s worth of records on 24 Secret Service personnel, according to a letter to the select committee. CNN has reached out to the Secret Service and the DHS inspector general for comment. The directive could complicate the Secret Service’s response to a subpoena it received from a House select committee last week, as well as a request from the National Archives this week to the DHS records manager asking the agency to clarify whether text messages were deleted and explain why. The chairman of the select committee, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, wrote in a letter to the director of the Secret Service that the committee was seeking text messages from Jan. 5-6, 2021. In a joint statement Wednesday, Thompson and the committee’s vice chairwoman, Rep. Liz Cheney, said they had “concerns” about the way the Secret Service’s cellphone data was deleted. “The content retention process prior to this purge appears to have been inconsistent with federal record retention requirements and may be a potential violation of the Federal Records Act,” they said. The Secret Service told the committee this week that it had made “extensive efforts” to determine whether any text messages had been lost and whether they could be recovered. Those steps included “extracting any available metadata to determine what, if any, messages were sent or received on the identified individuals’ devices,” the agency said in a letter, as well as interviewing the 24 individuals “to determine whether the messages had stored in locations not already investigated by the Secret Service.” The inspector general claimed the Secret Service deleted text messages from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, shortly after they were requested by oversight officials investigating the Secret Service’s response to the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill, according to a letter the an inspector was sent to the House Select Committee. The Secret Service previously explained that it was up to employees to do the necessary record keeping from their phones. The letter said the agency provided staff with a “step-by-step” guide to preserving cellphone content, including text messages, ahead of the phone relocation that began on Jan. 27, 2021. It went on to explain that “all employees Secret Service agents are responsible for properly maintaining government records that may be created through text messages.”
