You've probably heard the expression that the cover-up is always worse than the crime — a notion that was cemented by the mother of all U.S. political scandals, Watergate. Think about it — only five burglars were nabbed by D.C. cops inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972. But when the dust finally settled over the next couple of years, an astonishing 69 Nixon administration officials or allies of the 37th president were indicted, and 48 were convicted of crimes.
How did Watergate metastasize? As the scope of the investigation grew, more and more players felt compelled to lie to the FBI or to Congress or some other authority, or even to physically destroy evidence — either to hide what they'd done to help their boss Richard Nixon try to bury the scandal, or because the probers might learn about other nefarious activities.
For example, Richard Kleindienst, who was attorney general at the time of the Watergate break-in, came under scrutiny and was ultimately convicted of contempt of Congress for lying about a different Nixon-related scandal. And the acting FBI director, L. Patrick Gray, made the stunning admission that he'd taken papers from the safe of one of the ultimately convicted burglars, E. Howard Hunt, and burned them in his fireplace. Remarkably, Gray wasn't charged — but such episodes convinced the public that Nixon had warped the highest levels of government to serve him, and not the rule of law.
In the case of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, history is repeating. Arguably, we haven't quite reached the point where the cover-up is worse than the crime — because plotting a coup to thwart the peaceful transfer of presidential power may be the worst political felony in American history — but it's looking worse and worse, and the apparent extent of the cover-up continues to grow. No wonder that John Dean, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward and other key survivors of exposing Watergate insist that Jan. 6 is far worse.
The possibility of a major cover-up broke wide open earlier this month when investigators revealed that almost all texts sent by key Secret Service officials and agents on the critical dates of Jan. 5 and 6 have disappeared — blamed on a "technology transfer" even though USSS officials had been warned to preserve the texts before they were apparently destroyed. A major plot twist came this week when it was revealed that the Homeland Security inspector general responsible for USSS — a Donald Trump nominee who had worked for the GOP governor of Arizona — allegedly quashed his underlings' efforts to recover those messages earlier this year.
But a second major revelation about missing text messages at the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, should set off all kinds of alarm bells — both about the extent of the cover-up and also, more importantly, about what officials might be trying to hide.
The Washington Post is now reporting that the same tainted DHS inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, also learned back in February that Jan. 6 texts for the two top Homeland Security officials, the (dubiously named) acting Secretary Chad Wolf, and acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, can't be found. As with the Secret Service, the officials claimed their government phones were "reset" when the Biden administration took over. And as with the Secret Service, there are serious questions why Cuffari didn't do more to investigate or try to find the texts. Communications from undersecretary Randolph "Tex" Alles, a former Secret Service chief, are also gone.
Two things are important here. First, the idea that the destruction of this key evidence was an innocent mistake caused by a technology snafu is almost certainly complete and utter baloney. The headline for this excellent Washington Post analysis of the situation pretty much says it all: "Secret Service's 'ludicrous' deletion of Jan. 6 phone data baffles experts." These experts told the paper that the failure to back up critical records from such a high-profile event as the Capitol insurrection is "not something any other organization would ever do."
But even more critically, I want to raise the issue of just what exactly texts to and from DHS higher-ups like Wolf and Cuccinelli — part of a flood of ultra-Trump loyalists placed in critical government posts in the days leading up to the attempted coup — might reveal. Beginning in the summer of 2020 — as the fraught presidential election drew near and Trump was trailing Joe Biden in the polls — Wolf's DHS became the key nexus in a scheme to highlight leftist protesters who were branded, accurately or not, as and labeled America's top national security threat.
The focus of this effort that summer and fall was Portland, Oregon, where DHS dispatched highly militarized, camouflage-wearing units from its Border Patrol and ICE divisions to openly clash with racial justice protesters in the city streets. Some activists were even picked up off the street and put into vans. An internal agency report later said top agency officials promoted unfounded conspiracy theories about while violating the rights of protesters.
By that time, Trump had stepped up his focus on — with a growing eye on Washington and Jan. 6. There had been increasing street clashes between right-wing and left-wing protesters in the weeks after the 2020 election was called for Biden, with an especially violent outbreak in the capital on Dec. 12, 2020. It was less than a week after this battle that Trump posted his infamous tweet urging his followers to return on Jan. 6 for a day that "will be wild!"
The 45th president then did something quite odd for a supposed lame duck: He openly declared war on in a drive that came to a head on Jan. 5. On the day before the insurrection, the president tried taunting left-wing activists on Twitter, in a reverse-psychology tweet that they should "stay out of Washington." More importantly, a bizarre administration press release said, "President Trump will not allow Antifa, or any terrorist organization, to destroy our great country."
There have been other clues that Team Trump expected that fighting with antifa would define the Jan. 6 effort. Chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote in a Jan. 5 email that the National Guard was on standby "to protect pro-Trump people" the next day. The next morning, the Capitol Police were warned to look for leftist demonstrators in the crowd.
But none of this ever happened. In a history-defining plot twist, people on the left who'd protested Trump on prior occasions smelled a trap and spread the word: Stay home on Jan. 6. Someone even created a hashtag: #DontTakeTheBait. There's no record of any leftists in or around the Capitol, even though that afternoon Trump was telling confidants like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy that antifa was causing the Capitol mayhem.
We now know that some of the extremists in Trump's circle had been lobbying for the president to declare some sort of national emergency that could have allowed DHS or the military to seize voting machines. A Jan. 6 showing by leftists could have prompted such a declaration, or an early call to the National Guard to protect Trump supporters and clear the Capitol, thwarting the certification of Biden's victory. Such schemes might be reflected in the texts to or from the top officials in DHS — the messages we now know have been destroyed.
Both the House Jan. 6 Committee and the Department of Justice need to mount an all-out effort to learn what was in these texts — either through state-of-the-art forensics, if still possible, or testimony by whistleblowers who can recall what was being communicated that day. And anyone who intentionally ordered the destruction of evidence needs to be prosecuted to the full extent. It took a couple of years, but the wide scope of Watergate was ultimately revealed. The fate of democracy demands no less for Jan. 6 and its massive cover-up.
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