[what people say about gun control, universal health care?]
The U.S. Secret Service has reportedly only provided a single text exchange to the Department of Homeland Security inspector general, who had requested the agency hand over all text messages from 24 individuals around the time of the January 6th insurrection. The agency has also told the House January 6th committee that it has no new text messages to share with lawmakers. The Secret Service is claiming all the messages have been purged. Last week, a government watchdog with the Homeland Security Department, the inspector general, said in a letter to lawmakers that the erasure took place shortly after oversight officials requested electronic communications from the agency be preserved.
The messages could confirm testimony from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol in which she accused then-President Trump of attacking his own presidential security detail after the Secret Service refused to drive Trump to the Capitol to join the armed mob gathering to block Congress from counting Electoral College votes.
you have it right. That’s what we are being told. The whole thing stinks to high heaven. The idea that a government would either order or permit the destruction of texts relating to January 6th in the weeks following January 6 is just unacceptable. I mean, it’s just plainly appalling. And so, there is, you know, the bureaucratic and political question of how this happened, who ordered it, was it really according to some “preplanned” telephone migration, or was it obviously political as part of some kind of attempt to conceal evidence. And then there’s the technological question, which is: Regardless of how it happened or why it happened, can we retrieve and recover
— source democracynow.org | Jul 20, 2022