Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the chair of the Committee on House Administration, at a hearing on December 1, 2021.
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- The January 6 committee requested Secret Service text messages to figure out what happened the day of the riot.
- DHS inspector general said messages from January 5 and 6 were deleted in a “device-replacement program.”
- Rep. Zoe Lofgren on Sunday said the committee expects to retrieve those text messages by Tuesday.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a member of the House committee investigating the January 6 riot said the panel expects to get Secret Service messages by Tuesday.
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general said messages from Secret Service agents on January 6 and the day before the riot were deleted in a “device-replacement program.”
“Well, you can imagine how shock we were to get the letter from the inspector general saying that he had been trying to get this information and that they had, in fact, been deleted after he asked for them. We did get a briefing from the inspector of general of Homeland Security,” Lofgren told ABC News’s Martha Raddatz on Sunday.
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She added: “And then there was a statement made by the spokesperson for the department saying that it wasn’t true, it wasn’t fair, and that they, in fact, had pertinent texts — and we go, fine, if you have them, we need them.”
Lofgren told Raddatz that the committee needed all the texts from January 5 and January 6 to get the “full picture.”
“I was shocked to hear that they didn’t back up their data before they reset their iPhones. That’s crazy. I don’t know why that would be,” she said.
The congresswoman added that the next public hearing scheduled for Thursday will focus on former President Donald Trump’s and what happened and didn’t happen that day “minute by minute,” and said people can make their own judgments if there was a “dereliction of duty.”
