The committee now plans to reach out to Secret Service officials to ask about the deletion of text messages from the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol and the day before, including the agency’s records purge process to see if that was followed. policy. President Bennie Thompson told CNN. Members of the Jan. 6 committee expressed concern after the meeting about the differing version of events between the inspector general and the Secret Service and stressed that they wanted to hear from the agency itself. Cuffari told the committee that the Secret Service did not conduct its own retrospective review of the Jan. 6 incident and chose to rely on the inspector general’s general investigation, according to a source with knowledge of the briefing. The inspector general told the committee that the Secret Service did not fully cooperate with his investigation. Cuffari’s description left the impression that the Secret Service had been “dragging its feet,” the source said. The inspector general told the committee they did not have full access to staff and records. Cuffari said he brought the matter up with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas more than once and was told to keep trying to get the information. Ultimately, Cuffari decided to go to Congress because he couldn’t get anywhere with DHS with his concerns. Separately, a law enforcement official told CNN that Cuffari went to Mayorkas.
DHS said in a statement that it “has ensured and will continue to ensure that both the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol have the information they have requested ». Thompson told CNN that the IG said during their meeting that the Secret Service was not fully cooperative. “Well, they didn’t fully cooperate,” the Mississippi Democrat said, adding: “We’ve had limited engagement with the Secret Service. We will continue with some additional engagement now that we have met with the IG.” Thompson said the committee would work “to try to ascertain whether these texts can be resurrected.” The congressman previously told CNN after the meeting that the committee should interview Secret Service officials to get their perspective on what happened to the text messages that were deleted on January 5 and 6, 2021.
“Now that we have the IG’s view of what happened. Now we have to talk to the Secret Service. And we expect to be in touch with them immediately,” Thompson said. “One of the things we have to make sure is that what the Secret Service is saying and what the IG is saying, that these two issues are actually one and the same. And so now that we have that, we’re going to ask for physical information. And we will make a decision ourselves.” Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, who serves on the Jan. 6 committee, told CNN that there appears to be some “contradictory statements” between the inspector general of Homeland Security and the Secret Service about whether text messages from the Secret Service on January 5 and 6, 2021, they are truly gone. The inspector general initially notified the House and Senate Homeland Security Committees by letter that the text messages were deleted from the system as part of a device replacement program after the watchdog requested the agency’s records. “First, the Department informed us that several US Secret Service text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, were deleted as part of a device replacement program. The USSS deleted these text messages after the OIG requested electronic communications records from the USSS, as part of the assessment of events at the Capitol on January 6,” Cuffari said in the letter. “Second, DHS staff have repeatedly told OIG inspectors that they were not allowed to provide records directly to OIG and that such records first had to be reviewed by DHS attorneys,” Cuffari added. “This review led to weeks of delays in obtaining OIG records and created confusion about whether all the records had been created.” A DHS official provided CNN with a timeline of when the IG was notified by the Secret Service about the missing information caused by the data transfer. In a statement late Thursday, the Secret Service said the IG first requested information on Feb. 26, 2021, but did not specify when the agency identified the problem. According to the DHS official, the Secret Service notified the IG about the immigration issue on multiple occasions, beginning on May 4, 2021, then again on December 14, 2021, and in February 2022. In a statement Thursday night, the Secret Service said the inspector general’s claim about a lack of cooperation is “neither correct nor novel.” “In contrast, the DHS OIG has previously alleged that its employees were not granted appropriate and timely access to material due to an attorney’s review. DHS has repeatedly and publicly refuted this claim, including in response to the OIG’s last two semiannual reports to Congress. It is unclear why the OIG is raising this issue again,” the statement said. After initially requesting records from more than 20 people in February, the IG later returned to request more records on additional people, according to the law enforcement official. There were no text messages for the new request because they had been lost in transit, the law enforcement official said. The official also said the agency was informed of the transition and sent instructions on how to maintain phone records from the IT department.
CNN law enforcement analyst Jonathan Wackrow, who worked for the Secret Service for 14 years, said it would make sense for the inspector general to do the review after Jan. 6. From the Secret Service’s point of view, both the President and Vice President were kept safe, so the agency would not consider this an incident that should be reviewed in an after-action report, Wackrow said.
This story has been updated with additional developments on Friday. CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.