The U.S. Secret Service was apparently intending to comply this week with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Capitol riot targeting text messages from January 5 and 6 of last year.
The committee issued that subpoena amid concerns about the potential erasure of the messages. Joseph Cuffari, the inspector general overseeing the Department of Homeland Security, told the riot panel of deleted Secret Service texts, but the agency subsequently disputed that anything targeted by the Cuffari investigation was lost. Cuffari originally alleged the Secret Service erased texts after he asked for records of electronic communications, raising the obvious specter of potential political meddling. Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said his agency would comply with the early Tuesday deadline for compliance with the riot panel’s subpoena — although the next matter would be seeing exactly what it is they were turning over.
“We’re going to respond to all five sections of the subpoena in thorough detail,” he said, adding: “We additionally provided almost 800,000 documents, emails, radio transmissions, planning records, operational plans, Microsoft Teams chat messages — we provided all that stuff. We are going to provide all of that. We’re going to answer every single response to the committee’s subpoena as best as we physically can.” He also specifically denied there to be “hidden messages,” and he also said the agency doesn’t communicate much via text at all. The riot investigation committee issued its subpoena after the Secret Service push-back to the story of deleted texts came out.
“It’s hard for people to understand, but we do not communicate via text message,” the spokesperson said. “It is in policy that you do not conduct business via text message… There’s no reason for us to say the texts were lost. I mean, how do you know that those people texted? They were told to upload their official records, and they did. So this is partly what we’re going to communicate to the committee, all of the data that we have. People say texts were lost. How do you know texts were sent?” All of those remarks certainly might make one wonder whether the agency would be legitimately complying — or simply preparing an excuse for whatever it is that it’s doing amid the conflicting accounts of texts from around the time of the Capitol riot.
There are multiple critical lines of inquiry that records from the Secret Service could address. Trump was alleged to have gotten into a physical altercation with the head of his Secret Service detail on January 6 when that agent pushed for the then-president to return to the White House instead of go to the Capitol after his rally speech that day. In addition, it’s been reported that Trump goon and Secret Service agent Tony Ornato at one point informed Mike Pence’s national security adviser, Keith Kellogg, that the then-VP would be taken to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland amid the chaos at the Capitol. Kellogg was reportedly worried about Pence getting intentionally kept there to keep him from conducting his legal duties at the Capitol in the election outcome certification process. If such a plan — to keep the VP away — ever did, in fact, take shape, that would be simply shocking.
UPDATE: No matter all that gusto from the Secret Service spokesperson, the agency reportedly came to the conclusion it had not a single previously unrevealed text to share with Congress. Any not-yet-revealed texts that may have been sent around the time of the Capitol riot were erased, the agency indicated.
