The National Archives is getting involved in the growing scandal enveloping the US Secret Service over whether agents improperly deleted text messages sent during the January 6 attack after being ordered to preserve them.
The Archives issued a statement on Tuesday instructing the Secret Service to investigate and determine indeed whether text messages had been deleted by the agency as part of a supposed software overhaul after the agency had been explicitly instructed by the Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog office, the Office of the Inspector General, to preserve them.
The notice Tuesday from the Archives is important because it reveals that the independent agency is keen to enforce the Federal Records Act which requires that all such text messages and phone records be turned over and recorded. If an agent or agents in the Secret Service were found to have violated the act, it could have potential criminal consequences.
Meanwhile The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the Secret Service has had no luck in retrieving any further text messages sent between 5-6 January 2021, a troubling development that does nothing to help the agency’s growing credibility problem. A top leader at the Secret Service was basically denounced as a liar weeks ago by several former Trump administration officials after he contradicted the under-oath testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to ex-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows who testified that an agent told her the president had lunged at his body man and attempted to grab the steering wheel of the presidential vehicle after being told on January 6 that he would not be driven to the US Capitol.
It’s still unclear how many, if any, text messages from the hours leading up to and during the attack on Congress were handed over to the January 6 committee by Secret Service agents, but lawmakers on the panel including Rep Adam Kinzinger have indicated in interviews that they believe they are missing some if not all of the phone records in question.
The January 6 committee has been pursuing those records from the agency as it seeks to develop a “minute-by-minute” account of Donald Trump’s actions in the hours leading up to and during the attack on Congress. The inability to get unvarnished communications between the president’s protective agents would be an obvious blow to those efforts. The issue of the texts’ deletion is also highly suspicious given both the OIG’s instruction that the texts be preserved as well as the generally obvious importance of the records.
“In the very least, it is quite crazy that the Secret Service would actually end up deleting anything related to one of the more infamous days in American history,” committee member Adam Kinzinger remarked on Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS.
If Secret Service agents were found to have deleted texts from those two days in violation of the law it would be far from the first embarassing blemish on the record of the agency assigned to protect the president and his family.
In 2012 nearly a dozen agents were suspended after being caught with women in their hotel who were suspected being sex workers.
