Comment A surveillance agency learned in February that the Secret Service had purged nearly all cellphone messages from around the time of Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill but chose not to notify Congress, according to three people briefed on the internal discussions. That watchdog agency, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, also prepared in October 2021 to issue a public warning that the Secret Service and other parts of the department were blocking requests for records and texts related to the Capitol attack, but the did not do it, people briefed on the matter said. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal investigations. The previously unreported revelation about the inspector general’s months-long delay in marking the now-defunct Secret Service texts came from two whistleblowers who have worked with Inspector General Joseph V. Koufari, the people familiar with the internal discussions said. In recent days, a former employee approached the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), an independent government accountability group, and described the decision by Cuffari’s office not to immediately disclose that Secret Service records had been deleted from agency phones since January of 2021. The group relayed the information to congressional staffers, who independently confirmed the account with a second informant. Congressional staffers and two whistleblowers shared concern that Cuffari’s office did not notify Congressional investigators into the missing records have reduced the chances of recovering critical evidence related to the Jan. 6 attack. The whitewashed texts of secret service agents — some of whom plotted President Donald Trump’s moves on January 6 and shadowed Trump as he tried to overturn the election results — could shed light on what Trump was planning and saying. “It’s a dereliction of duty to keep the public and Congress in the dark for months,” said POGO senior researcher Nick Schwellenbach. “Digital forensics experts could have been working to recover these lost texts long ago.” Cuffari’s office did not immediately respond to allegations about the alarm on Wednesday. His office released an email saying he disclosed concerns in his semiannual reports to Congress in September and March that Homeland Security and the Secret Service were delaying his office’s investigation into the Capitol attack. The reports do not mention the text messages. The independent government accountability group called on President Biden to remove Koufari. On Wednesday, Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Vice Chairman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack issued a joint statement expressing concern that updating the phone system of Secret Service directed to “delete” the records – a possible violation of federal law – and that “every effort should be made to recover the lost data.” “The immigration process of the US Secret Service system moved forward on January 27, 2021, just three weeks after the attack on the Capitol in which the Vice President of the United States, while under the protection of the Secret Service, was steps away from a violent manhunt mob for him,” the lawmakers said. “Four House committees had already sought these critical records from the Department of Homeland Security before the records were apparently lost.” they said. “Additionally, 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.” The missing texts could provide a more detailed roadmap for Trump’s actions and plans around January 6. They could also confirm or deny White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony to the committee, in which she said a senior Secret Service official told her on Jan. 6 that Trump had become angry with the agent who led the security detail. after being told he could not join his supporters on their march to the Capitol. Hutchinson testified that the official — Tony Ornato, who was then acting as White House deputy chief of staff — told her that Trump had also run for the wheel of the Suburban in which she was traveling. Ornato denied telling Hutchinson, according to a Secret Service spokesman, and Trump’s former chief of staff, Bobby Engel, claimed there was no such physical altercation. The Secret Service said it turned over 10,569 pages of information to the committee on Tuesday in response to a subpoena issued last week, according to a copy of the agency’s letter released by the committee on Wednesday. The Secret Service acknowledged that on June 11, 2021, Cuffari requested messages sent or received by 24 Secret Service personnel between December 7, 2020, and January 8, 2021, two days after the uprising. Agency officials said they found a text message, a call for help from the US Capitol Police to the Secret Service, as Trump supporters ransacked the Capitol that day. In The five-page letter, Assistant Director of the Secret Service Ronald L. Rowe Jr. told the committee that the Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General in June 2021 asked them for text messages sent and received by 24 Secret Service officials at the time and that it “is currently unaware” of any lost texts. He wrote that officials are trying to find out if that is true, making “extensive efforts” to determine whether the messages were lost and “if so, whether such texts can be recovered.” Officials are pulling “any available metadata” to determine what text messages the 24 employees, who have not been publicly identified, sent on Jan. 5 or 6, 2021, conducting “forensic examinations of any available devices” they used and interviewing them to see if the messages were stored somewhere the Secret Service hadn’t looked. The Secret Service letter said it did, however, “reveal massive amounts” of records in the OIG’s office. The Secret Service also outlined the timeline for turning off the phones and said its employees are trained to preserve documents as required by the Federal Records Act. Officials said the planning process for the phone swap began in the fall of 2020, and chief information officers and CEOs decided in December to switch to Intune, a software management app for Microsoft’s mobile devices, the following month. The agency said it instructed employees to keep the content on their phones and began the “migration” process two days later, on January 27. The migration ended on April 1, 2021. However, individual agents were allowed to decide which messages should be kept and the rest wiped. The redacted texts raise significant concerns that the agency flouted basic document retention required by the Federal Records Act, and did so at the same time as congressional and executive branch investigators sought those records. Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who has testified before Congress on federal and presidential recordkeeping, said the Federal Records Act requires government officials to keep all relevant records, including emails and text messages. . He said the Secret Service had a duty to protect the text messages for historical reasons but also because it is a law enforcement agency, in case it was needed for congressional or criminal investigations. Even the accidental loss of information “should be treated as a serious matter,” he said. “These records are the history of the nation,” he said. “That’s what the Federal Records Act is all about.” The Secret Service’s claim that it can no longer retrieve bundles of agent text messages exchanged days before and on the day of one of the most chilling attacks on democracy in American history has spurred a legion of IT gurus and amateur sleuths into action. Some have taken to social media to dispute the Secret Service’s claim that the texts were lost forever — and are busy making the case about possible ways to recover the lost texts. Schwellenbach said Cuffari’s delay in reporting the problem necessarily reduces the chances of recovering data that wasn’t properly backed up and archived.
