“But Their Texts…” How Could So Much Critical Data around Jan 6 Simply Go Missing?

Image courtesy of Lawfareblog

It was bad enough that members of the U.S. Secret Service, including those who were on Trump’s security detail, “allowed” their mobile devices to be reset as part of a system-wide upgrade just weeks after the massively dangerous and damaging attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That resulted in the incomprehensible loss, perhaps a permanent one, of critical USSS text messages from that day and right before it. Those messages might have helped corroborate disputed testimony by Mark Meadows’ aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, that according to members of Trump’s own security team, the former president had attacked the driver of his vehicle and grabbed for the steering wheel in an attempt to force his motorcade to proceed to the Capitol building, rather than return to the White House. The messages might have also shed light on what was being communicated to the secret service agents who were protecting Vice President Mike Pence on January 6 and allegedly had been urging him to get into a car to be taken to safety. Pence had tellingly refused to do so, setting off intense speculation as to precisely why.

Now it appears the loss of critical text data loss isn’t limited to the USSS but also involves the very heads of the Department of Homeland Security, acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf and his acting deputy secretary, Ken Cucinelli. According to reporting by The Washington Post, texts from these top two leaders for the critical period leading up to January 6 are also lost and unlikely to be recovered. The missing communications are deeply troubling, particularly given the centrality of DHS to many of the key facts of the ongoing investigation, including apparent requests by Trump to have DHS seize voting machines around the time of the December 18, 2020 “Team Crazy” meeting in the White House, the warnings from DHS about dangerous internet chatter around plans for January 6, and the presence of security personnel as actual eyewitnesses to Trump’s behavior on and in the days following the insurrection.

The loss is also astonishing given the fact that, of any agency out there, DHS ought to have had in place the kinds of controls and procedures that would have prevented permanent loss of digital data. As CNN legal commentator and former prosecutor, Elie Honig, caustically noted, “Every federal law enforcement agency—including DHS / Secret Service—is fully aware that it must retain emails and texts, and has internal policies and technology to ensure compliance. You don’t get to say ‘technology upgrade’ and just toss everything out. They know this.”

To add to the mystery and accusations of a cover-up, it turns out that DHS’s inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, was notified back in February that the data for senior DHS leaders may have been lost. This was similar to the notice he had already received in December of 2021 that the Secret Service had deleted thousands of agents’ and employees’ text messages in an agency-wide reset of government phones a few weeks after the attack on the Capitol. Despite these two notices, Cuffari failed to take any action to attempt to recover them, nor did he inform Congress at the time of the lost data. 

Had he done so, and acted promptly, there might have been a better chance of recovering the missing communications. “It is extremely troubling that the issue of deleted text messages related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol is not limited to the Secret Service, but also includes Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, who were running DHS at the time,” January 6 Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement. “It appears the DHS Inspector General has known about these deleted texts for months but failed to notify Congress,” Thompson continued, his ire palpable. “If the Inspector General had informed Congress, we may have been able to get better records from Senior administration officials regarding one of the most tragic days in our democracy’s history.”

It is worth noting that the number of “missing” records are beginning to pile up. As the January 6 Committee demonstrated and media reports have verified, the White House phone logs for a critical seven hour period on January 6 are simply blank, despite known calls made by former president Trump from the Oval Office, including to his vice president, during that time. This could be because Trump was using cellphones to communicate rather than the White House switchboard, or it could be a deliberate cleansing of the record. But to add to the mystery, the presidential diarist told Congressional investigators that in the days leading up to the attack, he was provided fewer reports from the White House about whom the former president was meeting with and when those meetings were scheduled. 

There are also damning statements from an organizer of the rally at the Ellipse that he was told to use cash to purchase “burner phones” so that organizers could communicate with the White House, including with members of Trump’s family and former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, about rally preparations. And we know that top political aide to Trump Roger Stone used an encrypted messaging app to communicate with leaders of the Oath Keepers and The Proud Boys who are currently under federal indictment for seditious conspiracy.

Whether all these efforts to hide their activities and the possibly criminal deletion of relevant DHS and USSS texts will impact or slow the investigation remains unclear. But what does seem clear, at least to this observer, is that there was very much a deliberate effort underway to cloak the truth, followed by what very much feels like a Trumpian cover up, where officials did nothing to stop the planned destruction of very important federal property.