Leading congressional Democrats claim that the US Secret Service covered up the attacks on the US Capitol on January 6 by purging text conversations that would have implicated the perpetrators.
In a letter to the agency’s inspector general on Monday, New York Representative Carolyn B. Maloney and Mississippi Representative Bennie Thompson laid out the potentially incriminating claims.
In the letter, two well-known progressives charged Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari with orchestrating the cover-up and urged he resign while the House looked into the riots of 2021.
The troubled Homeland security official, who acts as the agency’s watchdog, has come under fire after it was learned that he first became aware of the missing messages in May 2021 – months earlier than previously thought and more than a year before he informed the House that potentially important information may have been erased.
It comes as part of an expanding probe into how the agency handled the since-deleted communications, which, according to the agency reps, may have shown that agents got guidance from superiors during the egregious daytime raid.
Maloney, who also serves as the House Oversight Chair Carolyn and Homeland Security Chair Bennie Thompson, wrote in the letter, “We are writing with grave new concerns over your lack of transparency and independence, which appear to be jeopardising the integrity of a crucial investigation run by your office.”
In May 2021 – seven months earlier than previously disclosed – your office discovered, according to recent allegations, that the Secret Service was missing crucial text communications as part of your investigation into the January 6 attack upon the U.S. Capitol.
The powerful Democrats said, “The Committees have found fresh evidence that your office may have covertly given up on efforts to obtain Secret Service text communications more than a year ago.
These materials also raise questions about your office’s potential actions to conceal the scope of missing records, which raises more doubts about your capacity to independently and successfully carry out your responsibilities as Inspector General (IG).
The agency was also charged in the letter of purposefully withholding the messages despite the House’s investigation, which started just over a year ago in July 2021.
It demanded that Cuffari’s immediate replacement be appointed and that two of the office’s senior workers testify this month regarding the erased texts and their contents.
The Secret Service, on the other hand, claims that the text messages that were deleted from at least 10 agents’ phones days after the riots were lost due to a previously planned data migration of agents’ cell phones that started on January 27, 2021.
The agency claims that the Secret Service told Cuffari’s office that they attempted to contact a cellular operator to retrieve the texts after they noticed they were lost after the data migration was finished in May of last year.
They claimed that despite demands from Congress and investigators, Secret Service text conversations sent and received around January 6, 2021, were destroyed. Cuffari revealed this in a letter she delivered to the two committees last month.
The House is particularly interested in the deletion of the communications because it may offer insight on the activities of then-President Donald Trump during the uprising, especially in light of subsequent allegations about his alleged altercation with security as he attempted to join supporters at the Capitol.
What will happen to the 10 Secret Service agents who were discovered to have erased texts from that period is currently unknown, as the Inspector General ordered the agency to halt its internal inquiry in the midst of a criminal investigation.
Secret Service officials, however, assert that the communications might have been unintentionally erased when the organisation began a months-long data migration of its phones on January 27, 2021.
The agency delegated the decision of which electronic records to maintain and which to discard during the process to individual agents.
The House Select Committee looking into the uprising wrote to the Secret Service with information that the inspector general originally requested records from 24 employees in June 2021.
In a letter to Secret Service Director James Murray dated January 6, committee chairman Bennie Thompson stated: “The Select Committee seeks the pertinent text messages, as well as any after action reports that have been issued in any and all divisions of the USSS pertaining or relating in any way to the events of January 6, 2021.”
‘All records and correspondence related to actual or attempted interactions between any DHA official and President Trump and/or any other White House official’ regarding the January 5 march and January 6 unrest were also expressly requested by the committee.
According to CNN, the request was made more than two months after the data move ought to have been finished.
According to insiders, Secret Service members were allegedly expected to manually backup their texts prior to the relocation at the time.
The process would have resulted in the mails of any employees who neglected to do so being permanently removed.
According to a Secret Service official, any messages that were not submitted by the employee as a government record would have been lost during the migration.