The US government records director asked the Secret Service to determine if any of their text messages dated January 5 and January 6, 2021, were improperly deleted. .
Patrick Semansky / AP
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Patrick Semansky / AP
The US government records director asked the Secret Service to determine if any of their text messages dated January 5 and January 6, 2021, were improperly deleted. .
Patrick Semansky / AP
Reports that the Secret Service had deleted text messages related to the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol caught the attention of the US Government’s director of records.
That officer, Laurence Brewer, said in a letter to the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday that the National Archives and Records Administration was “aware of the possibility of unauthorized deletion of text messages by the United States Secret Service (Secret Service)” on January 5 and January 6, 2021.
If the department determines that any messages have been improperly deleted, the Department of Homeland Security must send the National Archives a report describing the messages and why they were deleted and how. the agency tries to salvage them, Brewer writes.
Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, who is investigating the uprising in the Capitol, notified Congress that after asking for texts for the day before and the day after the attack, he learned that “many of these texts were deleted as part of a device replacement program.” That raised serious questions about whether the Secret Service, the agency that protects the president, destroyed federal records or the Department of Homeland Security impeded surveillance.
Anthony Guglielmi, communications director for the Secret Service, protested the IG account.
“The suggestion that the Secret Service maliciously deleted the requested text messages is false,” Guglielmi said in a statement last week. “In fact, the Secret Service has fully cooperated with OIG in every way – whether it’s interviews, documents, emails or text messages.”
The January 6 committee has issue subpoenas for documents.
