We already knew that the two Secret Service agents who have reportedly pushed back on bombshell testimony from Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson about former President Donald Trump in a presidential SUV on Jan. 6 were “very close” to him and have even been described as “yes men,” according to a Washington Post reporter. Secret Service Agents Denying Trump Freakout Claim Were His ‘Yes Men’: WaPo:
The Washington Post reported that three agents who were with Trump in the vehicle dispute that he “assaulted or grabbed at the leader of his security detail or that he grabbed for the steering wheel,” according to one current and one former law enforcement official familiar with the agents’ accounts. Various outlets also reported that Tony Ornato and Bobby Engel, the lead Secret Service agent in the vehicle, are willing to testify to the committee disputing Hutchinson’s account.
In light of these developments, Post reporter Carol Leonnig appeared on MSNBC and offered some background information on Ornato and Engel.
Here is our conversation with @CarolLeonnig , who literally wrote the book on the Secret Service, about the questions surrounding Cassidy Hutchinson's recounting of the story of Donald Trump lunging for the steering wheel when he found out he wasn't going to the Capitol. pic.twitter.com/LYB8zGdvtp
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) June 29, 2022
The author of a book on the Secret Service that covers the Trump years, Leonnig told Rachel Maddow that the pair “were very, very close to President Trump.”
“And some people accused them of at times being enablers and ‘yes men’ of the president—particularly Tony Ornato—and very much people who wanted to do what he wanted and see him pleased,” Leonnig said. “And that was frustrating to agents who were more focused on, say, security, or being independent, or good planning. So, both of these individuals lose a little credibility because of how closely they have been seen as aligned to Donald Trump.”
Leonnig then described the general political bent of the Secret Service during this time.
“There was a very large contingent of Donald Trump’s detail who were personally cheering for [Joe] Biden to fail. And some of them even took to their personal media accounts to cheer on the insurrection and the individuals riding up to the Capitol as patriots. That is problematic,” Leonnig said.
“I’m not saying that Tony Ornato or Bobby Engel did that,” she noted, “but they are viewed as being aligned with Donald Trump, which cuts against them.
Today we learn that someone within the “very large contingent of Donald Trump’s Secret Service detail” went so far as to erase text messages from January 5-6, 2021, after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General had requested them from the Secret Service (i.e., destruction of evidence).
If this story holds up, the destruction of potentially vital evidence about an attempt to overthrow the U.S. Government is an extremely serious federal crime that DOJ must immediately investigate.https://t.co/81e3U1YgnO
— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) July 14, 2022
CNN reports, Secret Service erased text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021 – after oversight officials asked for them, watchdog says:
The US Secret Service erased text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, shortly after they were requested by oversight officials investigating the agency’s response to the US Capitol riot, according to a letter given to the House select committee investigating the insurrection and obtained by CNN.
The letter, which was originally sent to the House and Senate Homeland Security Committees by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General, says the messages were erased from the system as part of a device-replacement program after the watchdog [inspector general] asked the agency for records related to its electronic communications.
“First, the Department notified us that many US Secret Service text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, were erased as part of a device-replacement program. The USSS erased those text messages after OIG requested records of electronic communications from the USSS, as part of our evaluation of events at the Capitol on January 6,” the letter from DHS IG Joseph Cuffari stated.
“Second, DHS personnel have repeatedly told OIG inspectors that they were not permitted to provide records directly to OIG and that such records had to first undergo review by DHS attorneys,” Cuffari added. “This review led to weeks-long delays in OIG obtaining records and created confusion over whether all records had been produced.”
The Intercept was first to report the DHS IG letter.
The US Secret Service and the Homeland Security inspector general did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment. The House select committee declined to comment.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, chairs both the House Homeland Security and January 6 committees.
While the letter does not say whether the DHS watchdog believes these text messages were erased intentionally or for a nefarious reason, the incident adds to growing questions about the Secret Service’s response to the US Capitol attack.
The Secret Service has been in the spotlight since witnesses have described how former President Donald Trump angrily demanded that his detail take him to the Capitol following his speech at the White House Ellipse – shortly before rioters breached the building.
A former adviser to then-Vice President Mike Pence also referenced the Secret Service in his testimony. Greg Jacob, Pence’s former counsel, told the panel that Pence refused to get into the vice presidential vehicle after being evacuated from the Capitol, raising concerns that the driver would have taken him to a secure location and thus prevent him from certifying the electoral results.
More than a year after the riot, the Homeland Security inspector general review of the Secret Service and its actions on January 6 remains ongoing.
The Secret Service has had a whole series of scandals over the years. This is just the latest scandal.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
UPDATE: 7/19/22: CNN reports, “Secret Service gives thousands of documents to January 6 committee, but hasn’t yet recovered missing texts”, https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/19/politics/secret-service-texts-national-archives/index.html
The US Secret Service produced an “initial set of documents” to the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection on Tuesday, in response to a subpoena last week that was issued amid reports of potentially missing text messages from the day of the insurrection.
“Our delivery included thousands of pages of documents, Secret Service cell phone use and other policies, as well as operational and planning records,” USSS spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement.
However, Tuesday’s document production didn’t include any of the potentially missing texts from January 5 and6, 2021, a Secret Service official told CNN. That’s because the agency still has not been able to recover any records that were lost during a phone migration around that time, the official said.
“Any message that was not uploaded by the employee as a government record would have been lost during the migration,” the USSS official told CNN, referring to the agency’s backup procedures.
Before the phone migration, Secret Service employees were supposed to manually back up their text messages. If any employees skipped that step, their texts would have been permanently deleted when their phones got wiped during the migration.
The Secret Service insists that it is still trying to recover any lost messages.
“We continue to scrutinize our records, databases, and archives to ensure full compliance with the Committee’s subpoena,” Guglielmi said in a statement. “We are taking all feasible steps to identify records responsive to the subpoena, to include forensic examinations of agency phones and other investigative techniques.”
The Secret Service informed the committee Tuesday that it is “currently unaware” of any text messages that were not retained, according to a source familiar with the Secret Service communication with the committee.
“We are currently unaware of text messages issued by Secret Service employees between December 7, 2020 and January 8, 2021 requested by OIG that were not retained as part of the Intune migration,” the agency wrote to the committee.
Congress informed the Secret Service it needed to preserve and produce documents related to January 6 on January 16, 2021, and again on January 25, 2021, for four different committees who were investigating what happened, according to the source. The Secret Service migration did not start until the January 27, 2021.
“Nobody along the way stopped and thought, well, maybe we shouldn’t do the migration of data and of the devices until we are able to fulfill these four requests from Congress,” said Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida, a committee member, in an interview on MSNBC. “The process as explained to us was simply to leave it to the agent to determine whether or not there was anything on their phones worth saving that was necessary to save for federal records.”
Separately, a source familiar with the matter told CNN that employees were instructed twice to back up their phones.
Secret Service employees were told in December 2020 and again in January 202 that if they were going to back up their phones, they’d need to do it manually, a source familiar told CNN. The source said employees were given instructions on how to do the manual backup.
Earlier Tuesday, the National Archives joined a growing list of federal agencies and officials demanding answers about the batch of missing text messages.
Laurence Brewer, the Chief of Records officer for the US Government sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security Records officer on Tuesday asking the agency to clear up if the text messages were deleted and explain why.
“If it is determined that any text messages have been improperly deleted (regardless of their relevance to the OIG/Congressional inquiry of the events on January 6, 2021), then the Secret Service must send NARA a report within 30 calendar days of the date of this letter with a report documenting the deletion,” Brewer wrote in the letter to Damian Kokinda, the DHS Records officer, referencing the DHS Office of Inspector General.
[T]he National Archives request is separate and apart from the House’s January 6 investigation. Their mission is to protect and preserve government records and by statute can compel an agency to explain why records may have gone missing. The probe into what went wrong will not be conducted by the Archives itself, but instead by Secret Service, which must then issue a report back to Archives.
“USSS has 30 days to submit a report to NARA on their investigation into the circumstances of this alleged unauthorized deletion,” a spokesperson for the National Archives said in a statement to CNN. “In general, investigations into occurrences of unauthorized disposal, deletion or removal are conducted by the designated Agency Records Officers who direct the records management programs in agencies.”
The Department of Homeland Security has previously said that it will comply with the subpoena request by the January 6 committee, saying in a statement that the department “has ensured and will continue to ensure that both the DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol have the information they have requested.”
Speaking with CNN host John Berman, Jeffrey Robinson, who co-wrote “Standing Next to History: An Agent’s Life Inside the Secret Service,” claimed the entire story that the texts from Jan 5 and 6th were accidentally erased was not credible and suggested a cover-up by the Secret Service.
“‘Very suspicious’: Secret Service expert questions use of texts on Jan 6th instead of agents using radios”, https://www.rawstory.com/secret-service-texts/
“Rep Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) says it’s quite crazy that anything would be deleted. How crazy do you think?” host John Berman prompted.
“It’s criminal,” the author immediately shot back. “First of all, you have to understand something, and you’ve been in the business long enough to know that when you do any sort of investigative journalism there are two pillars, first is there is no such thing as a coincidence and the second thing is everybody lies. That explains the Secret Service response.”
“Also, emails and texts do not get erased,” he continued. “You may take them off of your phone, you may take them off of some server, but they exist somewhere out in cyberspace. So if the Secret Service cannot find them, cannot turn them over or, more relevantly, is not willing to turn them over, the NSA [National Security Agency] can get them and the committee should turn immediately to the NSA to have everything.”
“But there’s something else at work here,” he continued. “These are texts and emails. You’ve followed the president, you know that when the secret service goes out with the principal, the president, there may be 150, 200 agents at every stop along the way in advance of where he’s going, where he’s been, whatever. They are all on the earpiece in their ear and the microphone on their sleeve. That’s radio traffic going around all the agents in real time and that’s all recorded. Why would anybody send a text or an email unless they didn’t want to be on radio traffic — that’s very suspicious.”
The New York Times reports, “Jan. 6 Panel Issues Subpoena to Secret Service in Hunt for Text Messages”, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/16/us/secret-service-subpoena-jan-6-committee.html
The House committee investigating the attack on the United States Capitol issued a subpoena to the Secret Service late Friday seeking text messages from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, that were said to have been erased, as well as any after-action reports.
In a statement, the committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, said the panel was seeking records from “any and all divisions” of the Secret Service “pertaining or relating in any way to the events of Jan. 6, 2021.”
The development came after the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of the Secret Service, met with the panel and told lawmakers that many of the texts were erased as part of a device replacement program even after the inspector general had requested them as part of his inquiry into the events of Jan. 6.
The Secret Service has disputed parts of the inspector general’s findings, saying that data on some phones had been “lost” as part of a planned three-month “system migration” in January 2021, but none pertinent to the inquiry. [Really? How do they know?]
Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, said “The committee is absolutely determined to get to the bottom of this and to find all of the missing texts,” Mr. Raskin told reporters on Capitol Hill. “They are missing, but in the age of high technology, we should not give up.”
I don’t know what happens when text messags are “erased as part of a device replacement program,” but I do know that simply deleting text messages does not “erase” them. “Once deleted, can text messages be retrieved?”, https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/once-deleted-can-text-messages-be-retrieved/
Clearing or deleting your messages on your devices doesn’t mean the data is permanently gone, it’s just been filed away differently. When you move messages around or delete them, the data actually stays put. All you’re doing is telling the phone to point at the files in different ways. Deleting a message from the inbox, for instance, just tells the phone not to point to it any more when it’s listing the contents of that folder. Even when you ‘permanently’ clear messages, you’re simply getting the phone to stop listing it in the deleted items folder. You can’t recover such texts on the phone itself, but there are plenty of commercially available software packages you can buy that allow your PC to read data directly from a SIM card. Some of the more advanced tools figure out the file structure on the card, thus allowing those long-hidden deleted messages to be resurrected.
“Secret Service Promises to Provide ‘Pertinent’ Jan. 6 Texts To Panel, Rep. Zoe Lofgren Says”, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/secret-service-deleted-texts-providing-jan-6-panel-zoe-lofgren_n_62d48322e4b0f69130312a1a
The Secret Service has informed the Jan. 6 committee that it will turn over “pertinent” texts during last year’s insurrection after reports of wholesale deletions of communications by the agency, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said Sunday.
“You can imagine how shocked we were to get the letter from the inspector general saying that he had been trying to get this information and that they had, in fact, been deleted after he asked for them,” Lofgren told host Martha Radditz on ABC’s “This Week.”
“And then there was a statement made by the spokesperson for the department [Secret Service] saying that it wasn’t true, it wasn’t fair, and that they, in fact, had pertinent texts ― so we said, ‘Fine, if you have them, we need them.’”
“We expect to get them by this Tuesday,” said Lofgren, who didn’t seem particularly optimistic about it. “So we’ll see.”
While Lofgren noted that the Secret Service said “pertinent” texts would be turned over, she told Radditz: “We need all the texts from the 5th and the 6th of January.”
It’s unclear how or if the Secret Service may have retrieved deleted texts — or if any deleted texts will be among “pertinent” communications provided to the Jan. 6 panel. The agency said last week that none of the deleted communications were “pertinent” to the investigation.
A DC police officer has corroborated Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony of Orange Julius Ceasar trying to commandeer the SUV from his secret service agents to go to the Capitol and lead his red hat storrn troopers in hanging Mike Pence and members of Congress in his coup d’etat.
CNN reports, “DC police officer in Trump Jan. 6 motorcade corroborates details of heated Secret Service exchange to committee”, https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14/politics/trump-secret-service-january-6-metropolitan-police-officer/index.html
A Washington, DC, police officer has corroborated to the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, details regarding a heated exchange former President Donald Trump had with his Secret Service detail when he was told he could not go to the US Capitol after his rally, a source familiar with the matter tells CNN.
The officer with the Metropolitan Police Department was in the motorcade with the Secret Service for Trump on January 6 and recounted what was seen to committee investigators, according to the source.
The description of the angry exchange between Trump and his Secret Service detail was a striking moment during the June testimony from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Hutchinson said that she heard a secondhand account told to her by then-White House deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato that Trump was so enraged at his Secret Service detail for blocking him from going to the Capitol on the day of the insurrection that “he reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel” and “then used his free hand to lunge towards” his Secret Service lead agent Robert Engel. Hutchinson testified that Ornato told her the story in front of Engel and he did not dispute the account.
Neither of the agents named in the testimony have commented publicly on Hutchinson’s testimony. But soon after it, [an anonymous] Secret Service official who would only speak on background, said Engel would deny parts of the story regarding Trump grabbing at the steering wheel and lunging toward an agent on his detail. The agency has said the agents involved would testify to that effect, though they have not yet gone to the committee to testify.
The committee is also engaging with the driver who was in the presidential SUV regarding possible testimony, the source said. A lawyer for the driver did not respond to a request for comment.
CNN has previously reported that two Secret Service sources have said they heard about Trump angrily demanding to go to the Capitol and berating his detail when he didn’t get his way. The sources told CNN that stories circulated about the incident in the months after January 6 – including details that are similar to what Hutchinson described to the committee.