During the Capitol storm by radical Trump supporters in January 2021, the Secret Service is on the side of both the president-elect and his vice president, Mike Pence. But what the agents wrote is unclear. The text messages have been deleted. The committee of inquiry will now look into this.
Following the deletion of text messages related to the January 2021 Capitol storm, the House investigative committee requested the missing information from the Secret Service. The committee is requesting all "relevant text messages" and all subsequent reports regarding the "events of January 6, 2021" by Tuesday, according to a letter from committee chair Bennie Thompson to Secret Service chief James Murray.
Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari previously told Congress that several text messages from Secret Service agents responsible for protecting the US President had been deleted. Many text messages sent shortly before and during the riots were "deleted as part of a device exchange program".
The messages were deleted after his office requested records of electronic communications surrounding Jan. 6, Cuffari said in a letter addressed to Thompson released Thursday. Cuffari also criticized the Secret Service for delaying the provision of other documents.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi had denied the inspector general's allegations. The cellphones of the bodyguards were wiped as part of a planned exchange program that began before the Department of Homeland Security requested the information six weeks after the riots. Certain phone data was lost, but "none of the text messages you were looking for".
Hundreds of radical supporters of the ousted US President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when the victory of his Democratic challenger Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential election was to be confirmed there. The Capitol storm with five dead is considered a black day in the history of US democracy. The committee of inquiry is currently holding a series of public hearings to uncover what happened at the time. It is also about Trump's role in the riots.
The text messages could be crucial to the investigation: Secret Service agents were with Trump that day and Vice President Mike Pence, who was hiding in the Capitol after Trump supporters called for him to be hanged. A former White House staffer testified before the investigative committee in late June that Trump wanted to force the Secret Service to bring Pence into Congress to join his supporters there.
