Assault on the Capitol: text messages erased by the secret services
Donald Trump had tried to force the Secret Service to take him to Congress to join his supporters there on January 6, 2021, according to Cassidy Hutchinson.
The United States Secret Service (USSS), responsible in particular for the protection of the President of the United States, erased text messages from several agents sent on the day of the assault on Congress in Washington on January 6, 2021 by supporters of Donald Trump, according to a watchdog.
Joseph Cuffari, Inspector General of the Department of National Security, said in a Thursday letter to congressional leaders that he had difficulty obtaining Secret Service records going back to to January 5 and 6, 2021.
These messages could be crucial to investigations by the House of Representatives and the Department of Justice to determine whether the former Republican president and his close advisers encouraged the murderous assault on the Capitol, in an attempt to to prevent the certification of the victory of his Democratic opponent Joe Biden in the November 2020 ballot.
Secret Service agents were on that day with Mr. Trump and with Vice President Mike Pence, who had been hiding in the Capitol after pro-Trump activists called for him to be hanged.
A former White House employee testified on June 29 before the House Committee of Inquiry that Mr. Trump tried to coerce the Secret Service into taking her to Congress to join his supporters there. /p>
The department notified us that numerous Secret Service messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, had been deleted as part of a device replacement program, Cuffari wrote in his letter, revealed by The Intercept then published by Politico.
USSS deleted these text messages after the Office of Inspector General (OIG) requested the records of electronic communications for the x27;review of the events of January 6, he continued.
Furthermore, he asserted, the department dragged its feet in recovering from the incident. other documents requested by the OIG.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi in a statement dismissed Mr. Cuffari's accusations, saying that the phones of the officers had been reset as part of a planned replacement program that began prior to the OIG's request six weeks after the assault.
Secret Service reported to the Office of Inspector General that data was lost from some phones but confirmed to OIG that none of the text messages they were looking for had was lost during this migration, he added.
