Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a member of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
- The Jan. 6 panel has received one text message from the Secret Service in response to a subpoena, Rep. Zoe Lofgren said.
- The agency reportedly can’t recover a trove of deleted text messages sent by agents on Jan. 6, 2021.
- The Secret Service said it is conducting a forensic search but the records are likely not recoverable.
The Secret Service submitted just one text message to the House January 6 committee in response to a subpoena compelling them to provide communications from the day of and before the Capitol riot, a panel member said.
The committee subpoenaed the text messages and other information from the agency after being told by a government watchdog last week that a trove of Secret Service texts had been erased.
The Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said the agency was still attempting a forensic search for the records, but indicated they were likely not recoverable, The New York Times reported. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the agency is prepared to say it has nothing new to offer to the committee.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democratic member of the panel, told MSNBC on Tuesday that the committee had received only “one text message” from the Secret Service, which she had not yet seen.
“In their letter they gave no indication that they have secured the phones in question and done some forensic work with them. That’s something we want to know,” Lofgren said.
“Obviously, this doesn’t look good … Coincidences can happen but we really need to get to the bottom of this and get a lot more information than we have currently.”
Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi told Insider that questions about the text messages should be directed to the January 6 committee as they involve “material responsive to a congressional subpoena.”
The investigators sought out the agency’s communications in order to learn more about the activities of then-President Donald Trump, whom it is the Secret Service’s job to protect, on the day of the riot.
The agency has found itself in hot water after apparently failing to preserve records from around that time, as it is required to do as an executive branch agency.
The Secret Service said the texts were deleted as part of a planned agency-wide reset of phones and replacement of devices in mid-January 2021, which took place 11 days after Congress first requested they preserve their communications, The Guardian reported.
The Guardian reported, citing unnamed sources, that agents were told to back up their data to an internal drive two days before the reset, though the instruction appeared to be ignored.
Rep. Stephanie Murphy, another Democratic member of the panel, told MSNBC on Tuesday that the agency did submit a trove of new documents but did not include the text messages that the panel was seeking.
“Their process, as explained to us, was simply to leave it to the agents to determine whether or not there was anything on their phones worth saving that was necessary to save for federal records,” she said. “As a result, today, they did not receive any texts from their agents when they made that transition that was flagged for preservation.”
The Secret Service has continually denied that it deleted the texts with any malicious intent.
Agency spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi told The Hill on Monday that there were no “hidden messages” being concealed, as the Secret Service do not typically communicate via text message due to security concerns.
“There’s no reason for us to say the texts were lost. I mean, how do you know that those people texted? They were told to upload their official records, and they did. So this is partly what we’re going to communicate to the committee, all of the data that we have. People say texts were lost. How do you know texts were sent?” he said.
