The Office of Intelligence responsible for protecting the president has deleted text messages sent by agents of the service during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, a government watchdog said in a letter released Thursday.
In the letter dated Wednesday night, Joseph Kovari, Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, told Congress that his office had difficulty obtaining records from the intelligence service for January 5 and 6, 2021. The messages may be crucial in investigations by the House of Representatives and the Department of Justice regarding Whether Donald Trump and his close advisers instigated the attack on the Capitol by supporters of the former president, with the aim of preventing the confirmation of Democratic Joe Biden’s victory in the November 2020 elections. Trump was accompanied during the attack by members of the intelligence service, as they were accompanied by a deputy President Mike Pence, who was moved to a bunker on the Capitol following calls from Trump supporters to “hang him.”
- Scan text messages
On June 29, a former White House employee told the parliamentary committee investigating the events of January 6 that Trump tried to force the intelligence service to take him to the Capitol to join his supporters that day. “The ministry informed us that several text messages belonging to the intelligence service, dated January 5 and 6, 2021, were deleted as part of a phone change program,” Kovari wrote in the letter, which was first announced by The Intercept before it was published by POLITICO.
He said that “the US intelligence service deleted those text messages following the Office of the Inspector General requested electronic communications records” for a review on January 6. He added that the ministry was late in sending other records to the Office of the Inspector General. Intelligence spokesman Anthony Guglielmi, in a statement, denied the inspector general’s comments. He said intelligence agents’ phone data were wiped out as part of a scheduled switching program that began before the SIGIR requested the information six weeks following the Capitol events. He confirmed that “the intelligence service informed the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Inspector General of the loss of certain phone data, but assured the Office of the Inspector General that none of the text messages it requested was lost in the process of switching” the phones. Kovari’s letter was addressed to the heads of the Homeland Security Committees in the Senate and House of Representatives.
- contradictory stories
The chair of the Parliamentary Homeland Security Committee is Representative Benny Thompson, who is also the chair of the Parliamentary Special Inquiry into the Capitol Events. The commission’s investigations sought to show that Trump knowingly instigated the attack as an attempted “coup”. The intelligence service has faced criticism for not anticipating the violent events committed by Trump supporters on January 6. At the time, Trump had appointed a senior intelligence official, Tony Ornato, as his deputy chief of staff. Ornato denied what former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson said in her testimony to the Special Inquiry into the Events that Trump tried to force the intelligence service to take him to the Capitol while his supporters were gathering in the building that houses the US legislature. However, other former White House officials endorsed Hutchinson’s account. (agencies)
