The House committee investigating the Capitol riot issued a subpoena this week for records from the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) related to January 6. The panel issued that subpoena amid concerns about text messages getting deleted as part of a so-called device-replacement program at the agency.
A July 14 statement from the Secret Service regarding access to text messages indicated “none of the texts” pursued by the inspector general’s office overseeing the Department of Homeland Security “had been lost in the migration,” meaning the process of starting a new system. “Accordingly, the Select Committee seeks the relevant 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,” panel chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said in a new letter. The above-cited Secret Service statement was somewhat of a clean-up operation. “The Select Committee has been informed that the USSS erased text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021 as part of a ‘device-replacement program,'” Thompson noted in his letter.
The Secret Service acknowledged that certain data on phones in the agency was lost, but it characterized the process resulting in the loss as “a pre-planned, three-month system migration,” adding: “In that process, data resident on some phones was lost.” The subpoena from the riot panel came within days of that Secret Service statement. It has a deadline for compliance of July 19 — which is noticeably before the next public hearing planned by the investigative committee. Previously, committees in Congress including the riot panel itself already sought Secret Service materials. An August 25, 2021, document request from that panel sought items including “all documents and communications relating to actual or attempted conversations between any DHS official and President Trump and/or any other White House official on January 5-6, 2021, relating to the January 5 rally, and/or the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.”
That range of materials would seemingly include anything that could provide documentation for a story from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who said she was informed by someone who’d been in the presidential vehicle at the time that Trump got into an altercation with the head of his Secret Service detail and lunged for the steering wheel on January 6. He was said to have done so while in a rage over that Secret Service agent pushing for him to return to the White House instead of go to the Capitol after the January 6 rally in D.C. where he spoke. The claim that Secret Service texts sought by the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security weren’t actually erased seems to contradict what that oversight official was previously told by the agency.
There’s more that Secret Service records could address. Trump goon and Secret Service agent Anthony Ornato is alleged to have told Keith Kellogg, a top adviser to then-VP Mike Pence, that the VP would be taken to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland amid the violence of January 6. “You can’t do that, Tony… Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it,” Kellogg reportedly replied. If Pence was kept in Maryland, he would’ve been unable to fulfill his required role in the Congressional certification of the presidential election outcome. Kellogg isn’t just some paranoiac — he’s a retired lieutenant general in the U.S. Army and was Pence’s national security adviser. Ornato denied that conversation took place, but that’s what Kellogg was reportedly concerned about — a frankly startling prospect. He reportedly thought Pence could be physically kept by pro-Trump individuals in the Secret Service from participating as required in certifying the election.
