According to claims by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a nonpartisan independent watchdog, and The Washington Post, the early January 2021 text messages of two top homeland security officials of the Trump administration are missing.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notified the agency’s inspector general in late February 2022 that messages between the department’s top officials at the time, Acting Secretary Chad Wolf and Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, were lost “in a “reset” of their government phones upon leaving office, the newspaper reported.
The allegations state that the inspector general’s office was also alerted by DHS’ office of the department’s undersecretary of management that text messages for Undersecretary Randolph “Tex” Alles, the office’s head and the previous Secret Service director, were no longer accessible.
The announcement comes in the wake of allegations that text communications of Secret Service agents who were present for the events of January 6 were lost after being erased on January 27, 2021, during an agency-wide technological upgrade.
Additionally, the loss of these messages was disclosed to the DHS inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, in February, but he failed to alert Congress. Cuffari discovered the deleted Secret Service messages in the same month but did not inform Congress until July.
“I complied with all data retention laws and returned all my equipment fully loaded to the Department,” Wolf wrote in a tweet, late Thursday. “Full stop. DHS has all my texts, emails, phone logs, schedules, etc.”
DHS wiped my phone after I left the department, Cucinelli tweeted on Friday.
A request for response from the Department of Homeland Security has gone unanswered.
In an internal memo to staff, Director of the U.S. Secret Service James Murray postponed his retirement on Thursday, promising to “[use] this time to monitor and assure our agency’s continuing cooperation, responsiveness, and full assistance with respect to current Congressional and other inquiries.”
“Not all federal records have to be preserved permanently, but when they’re created by leaders of agencies that pertain to government business, those are more likely to be the kinds of records you’d want to preserve for longer periods of time, potentially permanently,” Nick Schwellenbach, POGO Senior Investigator, who co-authored the report, told CBS News. “On its face, there’s a Federal Records Act violation even if there was no malicious intent here whatsoever. And the Department of Homeland Security really needs to get its act together in terms of its compliance with the Federal Records Act.”