January 6 committee member Jamie Raskin said he does not buy for “one minute” the counterargument being pushed by the US Secret Service about why all of the federal agency’s text messages from 5 and 6 January 2021 are missing.
While being interviewed by host Stephen Colbert on The Late Show on Monday night, the three-term congressman from Maryland, one of the Democratic panel members on the House select committee investigating the violent Capitol insurrection, was asked about whether he believed the Secret Service’s explanation for only being able to produce one text message in response to a subpoena from the committee that asked for all communications from the day before and the day of the riot.
“The secret service cannot find their texts to each other. And they sent one text,” began the late-night host. He then went on to ask the congressmen if he bought the explanation that the federal agency has since provided, which includes the denial that any text messages were intentionally deleted on or before 6 January and were perhaps lost “before any inspection” had opened in January 2021 because the agency had begun “a pre-planned, three-month system migration” that resulted phones being reset to factory settings.
“Do you buy their explanation at all?” asked Mr Colbert, to which Rep Raskin initially quipped back, “Is it for sale?”, earning a quick round of laughter:
“I don’t really buy that for one minute,” Mr Raskin added, before highlighting what an “odd coincidence” it seemed that “all the texts vanished for January 6 and January 5th”.
“And, you know, there was a pre-planned migration of the phones that just happened to be on the same day as the first violent insurrection in American history?” the Democratic panel member added. “So I’m a little dubious of that.”
In recent days, CNN has reported that the US Secret Service has since identified missing text messages from 10 agents’ phones that were found to be connected to the Capitol riot.
The agency is currently involved in a deep scrub of phones to scrape any metadata that would indicate whether messages that were either received or sent on or before the Capitol riot were intentionally deleted.
This internal investigation arrived just shortly after a letter from an inspector general at the US Department of Homeland Security – first reported by The Intercept and shared by the January 6 committee – found that there were text messages from agency personnel that were either unaccounted for or appeared to be erased.
When DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffar went on to specifically ask for messages sent from the phones of two dozen Secret Service personnel involved in the Capitol riot response, only one text message was produced.
A statement released on 14 July from a spokesperson for the federal agency, who employs a highly trained corps of agents whose task is to protect the president and senior officials, flat out denied that anyone in the agency had “maliciously deleted text messages”.
“In fact, the Secret Service has been fully cooperating with the [DHS inspector general] in every respect – whether it be interviews, documents, emails, or texts,” Anthony Guglielmi said, before noting that the agency had been conducting their “pre-planned” internal “device-replacement” programme.
“In that process, data resident on some phones was lost,” he added.
During the House committee summertime hearings, members scrutinised this defence, citing a letter that was sent to several federal agencies on 16 January 2021 which asked them to keep all communications intact that could relate back to the events that transpired on 6 January.
Rep Raskin, for his part, contended during his late-night appearance that, despite the federal agency’s seeming effort to try to obscure what occurred on personnel agents’ phones that day in January 2021, he believes the truth will ultimately come out in the wash.
“But I’ll tell you this,” the congressman began. “Everybody who has tried to hide a fact, and hide the truth from this committee has gotten his or her comeuppance because there are other people coming forward to tell the truth all the time.”
At the end of the interview, the Democratic panel member confirmed to the late night host that the committee has received a deluge of intel, joking at one point that it wasn’t “exactly an Agatha Christie mystery.”
“We know who dunnit,” he quipped, after stating that this was the first American insurrection that was taped instantaneously by everyone that was there.
The congressman was also pressed about whether the panel’s year-long investigation, which has compiled hundreds of thousands of documents and collected hundreds of testimonies from witnesses about the events that transpired on and before the Capitol riot, would hold Donald Trump, who Mr Colbert characterised as being an “obviously guilty man”, accountable.
“I think he’s good at what he does,” conceded Rep Raskin. “He’s been a conman and an operator for a long time … he always insulates himself with several layers of lawyers, money and flunkies between himself and that which he orders to be done.”
But the congressman stopped short of admitting that the twice-impeached president would be able to escape this recent probe of his conduct.
“It’s amazing, he’s like Houdini the way he gets out of it. But I think he’s met his match in Bennie Thompson, Liz Cheney and the January 6 Committee,” he said to an audience-wide round of applause.
The committee held its last summer prime time hearing on 21 July, during which Rep Bennie Thompson told viewers that they would resume with public hearings in September.
“We continue to receive new information every day. We are pursuing many additional witnesses for testimony. We will reconvene in September to continue laying out our findings to the American people and pushing for accountability,” Thompson said.
