So many Republican traditions in D.C.
Those deleted Secret Service text messages are not necessarily unrecoverable. People who might simply don’t want them recovered (Washington Post):
The Department of Homeland Security’s chief watchdog scrapped its investigative team’s effort to collect agency phones to try to recover deleted Secret Service texts this year, according to four people with knowledge of the decision and internal records reviewed by The Washington Post.
In early February, after learning that the Secret Service’s text messages had been erased as part of a migration to new devices, staff at Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari’s office planned to contact all DHS agencies offering to have data specialists help retrieve messages from their phones, according to two government whistleblowers who provided reports to Congress.
But later that month, Cuffari’s office decided it would not collect or review any agency phones, according to three people briefed on the decision.
In a letter to House investigators this month, Cuffari admitted the messages had been erased without acknowlwdging his section knew of the deletion in December and did not alert Congress. A Cuffari spokesperson declined comment Friday night.
A senior forensics analyst in the inspector general’s office took steps to collect the Federal Protective Service phones, the people said. But late on the night of Friday, Feb. 18, one of several deputies who report to Cuffari’s management team wrote an email to investigators instructing them not to take the phones and not to seek any data from them, according to a copy of an internal record that was shared with The Post.
The Secret Service denies erasing the texts maliciously.
“It’s déjà vu all over again,” says the Project On Government Oversight. Those are not the only texts missing from Jan. 6 (Mother Jones):
Key text messages for top Department of Homeland Security officials during the period leading up to January 6 riot at the capitol are missing, according to reports from the Washington Post and the Project On Government Oversight. The messages were on phones belonging to former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli, and former Secret Service director Randolph “Tex” Alles. The missing texts could have provided crucial information about what happened in the lead up to January 6, as well as how DHS responded to the attack that day.
Has anyone from Congress taken a trip to Bluffdale to see what the NSA has rattling around in its 100,000 square feet of hard drives? Or was that search cancelled too?
Public domain (CC0 1.0).
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