MSNBC Lawrence O’Donell laid out a convincing case against the Secret Service in Wednesday night’s program. The Secret Service explanation for the destruction of text messages on January 5-6, 2021 are simply not credible or believable. The question is “Was this a deliberate destruction of evidence in a coverup of Secret Service complicity with Donald Trump’s coup d’état on January 6?”
Newsweek reports, James Murray’s Trump Ties Face Scrutiny Over Deleted Secret Service Texts:
U.S. Secret Service Director James Murray is facing scrutiny about his ties to former President Donald Trump amid ongoing allegations about the apparent loss of text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021.
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell has said that Murray is “the problem” at the agency.
O’Donnell said that the agency has lost “the most important text messages in their history because no one there knew that those text messages were important” and accused Murray of being a “Trump guy.”
He quoted an NBC News report that stated the Secret Service had been told at least three times to preserve text messages and communications on the agency’s phones, citing a senior Secret Service official.
“The senior Secret Service official said it was James Murray’s responsibility to make sure all Secret Service texts sent and received on January 6 were preserved. And he did not do that,” O’Donnell said.
Murray was appointed to lead the Secret Service by Trump in 2019 and O’Donnell pointed to investigative journalist and author Carol Leonnig’s book where she claimed that Trump had originally wanted to appoint Secret Service agent Tony Ornato to lead the agency but Ornato recommended Murray.
Ornato was serving White House deputy chief of staff for operations in January 2021. He had been permitted to leave his Secret Service role temporarily in order to serve as deputy chief of staff, in what has been described as an unusual move for the Secret Service.
O’Donnell discussed a 10-minute interview Trump reportedly held with Murray before appointing him to lead the agency.
“That interview may well have in included the questions. Who did you vote for for president? Who are you going to vote for for president? And do I have your complete and total loyalty at all times for anything I might want to do?” O’Donnell said.
He went on: “We know that Donald Trump was not going to give that job to anyone who did not clearly pledge loyalty to Donald Trump.
“So we know that James Murray is a Trump guy in every sense important to Donald Trump or Donald Trump would not have promoted him to director of the Secret Service in April of 2019.”
O’Donnell went on to ask if Murray had done “a service” for Trump by “overseeing the deletion of all the Secret Service text messages on January 6.”
“The January 6 committee can answer all of these questions by issuing a specific personal subpoena to James Murray for his under oath testimony and a separate subpoena to James Murray for all his Secret Service text messages on January 6,” he said.
Just one text exchange from January 5 and 6 was submitted to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General Joseph Cuffari. That was also received by the House Select Committee investigating the events of the Capitol riot.
O’Donnell took aim at Murray for not saying anything publicly amid what he called the “worst crisis facing the Secret Service since the assassination of President Kennedy.”
“We have never seen a problem like this at the Secret Service,” he said. “It’s a very serious problem at the Secret Service. And James Murray is part of that problem. Or James Murray is the problem.”
Others have also joined in criticism of Murray. MSNBC legal analyst Jill Wine-Banks tweeted on Wednesday: “There must be consequences for anyone at @SecretService who did not back up their data and for the leadership who did not make it happen. Director #JamesMurray must be fired today.”
Pam Keith, CEO of the Center for Employment Justice, tweeted: “James Murray and Tony Ornato should be on EVERYONE’s list of suspects” and said they were “hand picked” by Trump.
Today NBC News reports, DHS watchdog has launched criminal probe into destruction of Jan. 6 Secret Service text messages, sources say:
The Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General has launched a criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the destruction of Secret Service text messages that may have been relevant to inquiries about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.
The results of the investigation could be referred to federal prosecutors, the sources said, depending on the results.
The DHS Inspector General informed the Secret Service on Wednesday evening that the investigation is now criminal and that it should halt all internal investigations on the missing text messages, according to a letter detailed to NBC News.
“To ensure the integrity of our investigation, the USSS must not engage in any further investigative activities regarding the collection and preservation of the evidence referenced above,” DHS Deputy Inspector General Gladys Ayala wrote in a letter to Secret Service Director James Murray on Wednesday evening. “This includes immediately refraining from interviewing potential witnesses, collecting devices or taking any other action that would interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation.”
The letter was first reported by CNN.
In a statement, the Secret Service said it was “in receipt of the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General’s letter. We have informed the January 6th Select Committee of the Inspector General’s request and will conduct a thorough legal review to ensure we are fully cooperative with all oversight efforts and that they do not conflict with each other.”
However, a Secret Service official said the letter raises some legal complexities, because while DHS has asked Secret Service to halt its internal inquires the agency also faces a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee and a demand for information about the texts from the National Archives.
As Newsweek reports, Mike Pence Jan. 6 Testimony Could Finally Disclose Secret Service Answers:
The House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021 may soon seek testimony from former Vice President Mike Pence, according to Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger.
Pence’s potential testimony could shed light on issues surrounding the former vice president’s interaction with the Secret Service during the Capitol riot and in particular suggestions that Pence believed there was a coup attempt.
Kinzinger, one of two Republicans sitting on the committee, told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that the select committee is considering asking Pence to appear before them for an interview.
As a major figure in former President Donald Trump’s administration, Pence could provide key answers on a number of questions concerning January 6 and efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Pence was present at the U.S. Capitol when the riot began and he may be able to answer lingering questions about the role his Secret Service detail played on the day.
During the riot, Pence refused to get into an armored limousine manned by Secret Service agents and he has so far offered no explanation about that decision.
In April, Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who sits on the select committee, suggested that Pence had refused to get into the vehicle because he felt it was part of an attempted coup.
“He knew exactly what this inside coup they had planned for was going to do,” Raskin said. “It was a coup directed by the president against the vice president and against the Congress.”
Some have theorized that the intention of Pence’s Secret Service detail was to drive the then vice president away from the Capitol in order to prevent him from carrying out his role in certifying the 2020 Electoral College votes.
This theory has not been proven but it is highly likely Pence will be asked about his interactions with the Secret Service if he appears before the committee.
The DHS Inspector General will also want answers to these questions from Mike Pence.
It is time for Mike Pence to step up and to do his patriotic duty and testify under oath before the January 6 Committee.
UPDATE: Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) told The Bulwark that the January 6 Committee will present testimony corroborating former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony about a confrontation she had heard about between former President Donald Trump and Secret Service agents.
Said Kinzinger: “So tonight, we’re going to play some testimony from people that in essence confirms the limo incident. . . . We know that there was some heated stuff going on in the limo.”
He added: “Nobody has come in to refute her. And just as you have said, nobody has come in from the Secret Service on the record under oath, and refuted what she has said. There’s been anonymous sources. That’s it.”
Anonymos sources inside the Secret Service had tried to discredit Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony in right-wing media, and even said that agents would come forward to testify to refute her testimony. Yeah, not so much.
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CNN reports, “First on CNN: Secret Service identified potential missing text messages on phones of 10 individuals”, https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/22/politics/secret-service-investigators-text-messages/index.html
Secret Service investigators were scrutinizing the phones of 10 Secret Service personnel that contained metadata showing text messages were sent and received around January 6, 2021, but were not retained, two sources told CNN.
[I]nvestigators had been working to determine whether the content of the text messages sent by the 10 personnel contained relevant information that should have been preserved, the sources said. Among the 24 Secret Service personnel under scrutiny, 10 other Secret Service personnel had no text messages, and three had only personal records, according to the sources.
The details of scrutiny of messages from 10 Secret Service personnel caps an extraordinary week of turmoil for the agency, which started with the inspector general demanding answers about potential missing texts and led to a congressional subpoena and a criminal investigation into the matter.
The text messages at issue may have been deleted when the agency conducted a data migration of phones that began January 27, 2021. According to a letter sent from the Secret Service to the House select committee investigating the insurrection, which has also sought messages around January 6 from the Secret Service, the inspector general asked for records from the 24 personnel in June 2021 — more than two months after the migration had been completed.
Members of the House select committee have stressed their belief the agency should have done more to preserve records prior to the migration, citing a January 16, 2021, letter from congressional committees to multiple agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis, instructing them to preserve records related to January 6.
[Say What???]
Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, told CNN the agency conducted an eight-hour search Thursday of various internal message systems to try to determine if the January 16 request was sent to the Secret Service. No record of that letter ever reached the Secret Service, he said.
Note: The Service did not need a damn retention letter. Everything that day should have been preserved for an after action investigation by the Service into what went wrong. In fact, an after action investigation was suposed to have been done but apparently did not occur – also a violation.
Things I know to be true: “Secret Service ‘better than Quantico’ at retrieving deleted texts says ex-prosecutor who wants ‘criminal investigation’”, https://www.rawstory.com/secret-service-better-than-quantico-at-retrieving-deleted-texts-says-ex-prosecutor-who-wants-criminal-investigation/
Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner is calling for a “criminal investigation” into the U.S. Secret Service’s deleted text messages, revealing that the agency’s forensic experts are “even better than” the FBI’s Quantico lab at retrieving data like deleted text messages.
“I am not fully buying an innocent explanation,” Kirschner, who was a federal prosecutor for nearly three decades.
Kirschner notes that “cell phone providers will purge text messages over time,” but says, “what’s gotten me, got me so sort of frustrated and a little bit angry,” is when “I was a federal prosecutor at the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, and we obtained evidence – cell phone evidence, and it looked like the target, the owner of that cell phone had deleted information off of it, you know where we went to have a forensic search and a recovery of deleted information taken from those cell phones? We went to the United States Secret Service Forensic Sciences Division, because they are the premier unit.”
“I’m going to say even better than the lab down at Quantico, the FBI lab. They are the premier unit that can recover deleted information off of cell phones and computers,” he explains.
“I am hugely concerned these text messages should have been preserved in the first instance [for the National Archives]. They should be turned over to authorities, whether congressional or law enforcement authorities, they should be backed up. They should still be retrievable.”
“If they did nothing wrong, they should welcome a law enforcement investigation,” Kirschner adds, noting “if they have nothing to be concerned about they should welcome an FBI investigation of how it is that this important, historic evidence was deleted.”
[T]he Washington Post revealed the Inspector General knew as early as February that the texts had been deleted, but did not notify Congress until July.
The Guardian reported Wednesday, “11 days after Congress first requested the communications and two days after agents were reminded to back up their phones” the texts were seemingly lost as part of an agency-wide reset of phones on 27 January 2021.”
-The radio transmissions of Secret Service chatter on January 6 seem to have been preserved because portions were played during last night’s January 6 Committee hearing. One revelation: Mike Pence’s Secret Service detail was contacting their family members to tell them that they loved them and to say goodbye because they thought they may be killed by Trump’s mob. Were they using their service phones to do this? Is this part of the text messages that may have been destroyed as part of a coverup? Were there text messages about Trump trying to commandeer the SUV to go to the Capitol that may have been destroyed as part of a coverup?