The keeper of federal records asked the Secret Service to determine whether any text messages by agents around the time of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol were improperly deleted.
The National Archives and Records Administration said in a letter Tuesday to the agency that it must submit a report within 30 days documenting what occurred.
“This report must include a complete description of the records affected, a statement of the exact circumstances surrounding the deletion of messages, a statement of the safeguards established to prevent further loss of documentation, and details of all agency actions taken to salvage, retrieve, or reconstruct the records,” the National Archives wrote.
The House committee investigating the efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election has also subpoenaed the agency for the texts.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General notified the committee that some text messages sent by Secret Service agents on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 were lost when equipment was updated.
Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said in a tweet that the agency “respects and supports the important role of the National Archives and Records Administration in ensuring preservation of government records. They will have our full cooperation in this review.”
He previously has said the texts were inadvertently lost during an equipment upgrade prior to the Inspector General’s request for them and that the agency would cooperate with the committee.
However, the agency determined it doesn’t have any new texts to provide the committee and that any other texts its agents exchanged around the time of the 2021 attack on the Capitol were purged, the Washington Post reported Tuesday, citing a senior official briefed on the matter.
The Secret Service didn’t respond to a request for comment on the report.
“I don’t want to say they are hiding something,” Representative Stephanie Murphy, a Florida Democrat, said on MSNBC. She said the matter raised serious questions about Secret Service data processes.
“This information is too important to have been handled and misplaced,” she said.
