WASHINGTON — The House panel investigating the assault on the U.S. Capitol met Friday with representatives of the Homeland Security Department’s watchdog who said the Secret Service isn’t cooperating with its investigation.
“They shared their views,” Bennie Thompson, chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, said afterward. He said the Homeland Security Inspector General told the committee that the Secret Service “has not been cooperating.”
“We will move toward engaging the Secret Service,” Thompson told reporters in the Capitol.
Representatives of the Secret Service, which is a unit of Homeland Security, and the Inspector General’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, said in a letter to the committee on Wednesday that texts from Secret Service agents on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021 were reported lost during an equipment replacement after his office asked for them as part of its investigation of the assault.
Release of the letter drew an angry reply from the Secret Service Thursday night. “The insinuation that the Secret Service maliciously deleted text messages following a request is false,” the agency said in a statement.
Some data were lost when the agency had begun to reset its mobile phones to factory settings in January 2021, before the Inspector General’s inspection began the next month, according to the statement.
Some of the most riveting testimony from the Jan. 6 panel’s televised hearings concerned then-President Donald Trump’s actions after he addressed a rally near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021. A former aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, said she was told Trump wanted to join the mob then marching on the Capitol but was blocked by his security detail.
The texts could provide insight into that episode as well as security concerns surrounding then-Vice President Mike Pence, who had gone to the Capitol to preside over the Electoral College certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
Panel members said there’s a possibility some of the texts could still be recovered.
“There have been contradictory statements about whether or not they’re gone,” said panel member Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. “I’m no expert on the technical side of this, but there are people who have said that, you know, even texts that have been deleted can be recovered in some way. So it depends on the technology, depends on when it happened, and so on.”
Thompson confirmed that the committee will hold a prime-time hearing on Thursday at 8 p.m., the second in the series of televised hearings held this month and last.
