Recall: The Secret Service was directed to preserve all text messages sent that day by agents, as well as those sent the day prior to the January 6 Capitol Insurrection. Procuring these messages became all the more pressing when serious questions were raised about agents’ behavior toward former Vice President Mike Pence. To put it another way: Did they try to take him out of the building to stop him from certifying the election? Did agents participate in the coup attempt to overthrow? These texts may also serve to verify former White House Aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony that Donald Trump, when informed he could not join the rioting mob at the Capitol, flipped out and attacked members of his detail.
The House Select Committee is investigating the January 6th attack dropped a subpoenaThe Secret Service promised an answer by yesterday to the agency regarding the last week’s call to them. Yesterday came and yesterday went and the Secret Service had not been able to locate any of its clients. one single text message. They claim that the rest are permanent gone and unrecoverable.
“Many of its agents’ cellphone texts were permanently purged starting in mid-January 2021 and Secret Service officials said it was the result of an agencywide reset of staff telephones and replacement that it began planning months earlier,” reports The Washington Post. “Secret Service agents, many of whom protect the president, vice president and other senior government leaders, were instructed to upload any old text messages involving government business to an internal agency drive before the reset, the senior official said, but many agents appear not to have done so.”
This, to put it mildly is a stinking disaster. This defiance of a document protective orders is a sign of a Trumpless world. AndA congressional subpoena can lead to mass firings or other serious consequences. It has been widely reported that members of Trump’s Secret Service detail were as much a part of his partisan political operation as his own kids, making the disappearance of these texts from the day Trump allegedly attempted treason all the more disturbing.
The Secret Service’s technical explanations also fail the smell test. Arick Wierson, former deputy commissioner in New York City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, explains:
As a deputy commissioner, I was involved in numerous meetings whenever there was a major technology upgrade, platform transition, or any other significant change that affected city employees. It included everyone from rank-and-file police officers to the mayor himself…. It is important to note that any major technology device transfer cannot be made without having backups and redundancy.
Remember that IT professionals in the public sector are not the only ones involved when major technology overhaul decisions are made, especially with FOIL and FOIA laws. In the city of New York, when one agency is upgrading tech from one device to another, lawyers — representatives from each agency’s Office of General Counsel — help ensure that all applicable data is being safely preserved. There are many people who have an eye on any major technology overhaul.
And this makes Tuesday’s news that the Secret Service has turned overIt was alarming that the January 6 committee has received thousands of documents but has not yet recovered the missing text. If the deletions were due to some strange act of benign negligence it should have been straightforward for IT specialists to retrieve the data. The Secret Services insists they are still trying to find the missing messages.
Yeah, and if my uncle had wheels, he’d be a wagon. These are just a few of the many questions. Were there agents on-scene? using private textingOr other platforms to communicate? Is there a connection between these missing text and Director James M. Murray being absent? abruptly ending his 27-year Secret Service careerSnapchat to work?
“Failure to preserve and produce these messages may be illegal,” NBC News presidential historian Michael Beschloss tweetedTuesday. “Prompt investigation is now essential. It is crucial for Americans to immediately find out if the United States Secret Service was compromised. With crucial evidence now reported to have been destroyed, the potential physical danger to President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris from actions (or lapses) of U.S. Secret Service on January 6 (and the period around that date) must now be investigated immediately.”
Hopefully, at this point, some of these agents are getting nervous — that particular kind of nervous that comes with having done something that will likely come back to bite you, and soon.
I know a little about this. It is safe to say that I did not hide my academic glory during my first semester of college. I was there to have fun, not for the studies. I was kicked in the head. I happened to be home when my awful grades arrived in the mail, and in a spasm of ill-conceived panic, I gave them the ol’ pocket veto treatment, hoping my mother would somehow forget that my school measured achievement with an alphabetical system that got sent home twice a year like clockwork.
Of course, I was eventually busted, and I’m pretty sure I’m still grounded lo these 30 years later … but what I remember most about the whole shameful affair was the week I spent with a boulder in my stomach, like there was a bag of hot cats in my chest trying to get out. I sat there with my grades in a crumpled bag in that pocket. You areThey whispered, An asshole. The walls were closed in. It was almost a relief to be caught. No, it’s not. WasIt was a relief. I no longer had to pretend I hadn’t done such a thing – twice, if you count the grades themselves – and endeavored going forward to remember who I was supposed to be, instead of who I became in that moment of weakness and fear.
Remembering all this today, I am wondering how many Secret Service agents are walking around with their own bag of cats roiling their chests, clutching a sweaty cell phone in their pocket, wishing the proffered excuses for all those missing text messages didn’t sound like the hairball coughed up by Rose Mary Woods explain the recording gapIn the Nixon Watergate tapes. Maybe – hopefully – they’re wishing they hadn’t tried to erase history with the news media, a clutch of watchdogs and a congressional committee breathing down their necks.
Perhaps none of them really want it, but they still hold on to their illconceived loyalty to their former leader. Regardless, It only gets more hot from here.
