Jan. 6 committee subpoenas Secret Service over deleted texts

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol announced that it has issued a subpoena for records from the United States Secret Service over deleted text message and made it the first time the committee has issued a subpoena to an executive branch agency.

Anthony Guglielmi, chief of communications for the Secret Service, issued a statement Saturday in response to the subpoena.

“The January 6th Select Committee has had our full and unwavering cooperation since its inception in March of 2021 and that does not change. Over the last 18 months, we have voluntarily provided dozens of hours of formal testimony from special agents and over 790,000 unredacted emails, radio transmissions, operational and planning records. We plan to continue that cooperation by responding swiftly to the Committee's subpoena,” the statement said.

Chairman Bennie Thompson on Friday sought information about Secret Service text messages from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, that a government watchdog said were erased and reiterated three previous requests from congressional committees for information.

Chairman Thompson wrote, “The Select Committee has been informed that the USSS erased text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021 as part of a ‘device-replacement program.’ In a statement issued July 14, 2022, the USSS stated that it ‘began to reset its mobile phones to factory settings as part of a pre-planned, three-month system migration. In that process, data resident on some phones was lost.’ However, according to that USSS statement, ‘none of the texts it [DHS Office of Inspector General] was seeking had been lost in the migration.’

“Accordingly, the Select Committee seeks the relevant text messages, as well as any after action reports that have been issued in any and all divisions of the USSS pertaining or relating in any way to the events of January 6, 2021.”

This week, Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari offered a briefing to the House Committee on Homeland Security and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs about “ongoing access issues” with the Department of Homeland Security, specifically that “many U.S. Secret Service (USSS) text messages, from January 5 and 6, 2021, were erased as part of a device-replacement program.”

On Friday, Inspector General Cuffari briefed the Jan. 6 committee on this and other matters.