The US National Archives has asked the Secret Service to conduct an internal investigation over “erased” text messages from the day before and the day of the Capitol attack, according to a letter sent to the agency’s records management officer on Tuesday.
The request marks the latest escalation of the matter after the watchdog for the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general, notified Congress he had sought the texts only to be told they no longer existed.
In the letter sent to the Secret Service records officer, reviewed by the Guardian, the National Archives requested the agency launch an internal review and report within 30 calendar days if it finds any texts were “improperly deleted”.
The letter noted that the Secret Service was required to produce a report by law, and that it must report its findings regardless of whether the erased texts were relevant to the inspector general’s inquiry or the House January 6 investigation.
“This report must include a complete description of the records affected,” the National Archives said, “a statement of the exact circumstances surrounding the deletion of messages [and] all agency actions taken to salvage, retrieve, or reconstruct the records.”
The value of asking the Secret Service to conduct an investigation into itself about messages its own personnel appear to have deleted was not immediately clear, given the agency, the inspector general said, has already slow-walked his internal review.
In a statement, a Secret Service spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, said 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.”
The circumstances surrounding the erasure of the Secret Service texts have become central for the January 6 committee as it investigates how agents planned to move Donald Trump and Mike Pence as the violence unfolded.
The controversy over the erased texts erupted last week after the letter from the inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, became public, and the committee went into overdrive to assess the impact on its investigation.
In the letter, the inspector general said certain Secret Service texts from 5 and 6 January 2021 were erased amid a “device replacement program” even after he requested the messages for his internal inquiry.
The Secret Service has disputed that, saying in a statement that data on some phones were lost as part of a pre-planned “system migration” in January 2021, and that Cuffari’s initial request for communications came weeks later, in late February.
But the committee has questioned the Secret Service’s emphasis on that date, according to sources close to the inquiry, noting that the first request for Secret Service communications came from Congress, just 10 days after the Capitol attack.
Bennie Thompson, chair of the committee, met the staff director, David Buckley, and deputy director, Kristen Amerling, after he received Cuffari’s letter, and the full panel promptly asked for a briefing on the matter.
At the briefing, the Guardian first reported, Cuffari told the committee the Secret Service’s story about how the texts disappeared kept shifting. At one point it was because of a software upgrade. At another it was because devices were swapped out.
Hours after the briefing, the committee issued a subpoena for any texts that had not been erased, as well as any after-action reports the agency might have conducted into its response to January 6.
Regardless of how the messages were lost from individual devices, the Secret Service, like any other executive branch agency, is supposed to back up data and messages so government records are preserved.
But the Secret Service has often flouted that rule, according to a source familiar with the matter, and critical communications have in the past repeatedly gone missing as soon as the Secret Service has become the subject of oversight or internal investigations.
At the briefing to the committee last week, the Guardian also reported, Cuffari discussed the feasibility of using forensic tools to reconstruct the missing texts, something the justice department has previously been able to do as recently as 2018.
