As if the recent, massive scandal surrounding the Secret Service’s deleted January 6th text messages (that has now officially mounted into a criminal investigation) weren’t already enough, bombshell new reporting from CNN now reveals that the Defense Department allegedly wiped the phones of numerous top Department of Defense and Army officials at the end of the Trump administration, likely leaving far more January 6th evidence deleted than we originally knew.
The thundering CNN report reads:
The acknowledgment that the phones from the Pentagon officials had been wiped was first revealed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit American Oversight brought against the Defense Department and the Army. The watchdog group is seeking January 6 records from former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, former chief of staff Kash Patel, and former Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, among other prominent Pentagon officials — having filed initial FOIA requests just a few days after the Capitol attack.
Miller, Patel and McCarthy have all been viewed as crucial witnesses for understanding government’s response to the January 6 Capitol assault and former President Donald Trump’s reaction to the breach.”
The unsettling news naturally elicited a lot of response among former officials, including Alyssa Farah Griffin, the former Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Media Affairs and the Press Secretary for the Department of Defense, who tweeted, “This is nuts. When I was at DOD everything on my government phone & laptop was required to be archived. The idea that we just wipe federal records when a presidential transition takes place is an affront to government transparency.”
This is nuts. When I was at DOD everything on my government phone & laptop was required to be archived. The idea that we just wipe federal records when a presidential transition takes place is an affront to government transparency. https://t.co/MD3zDRwSTx
— Alyssa Farah Griffin 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 (@Alyssafarah) August 2, 2022
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This news, in combination with the previously known Secret Service issue, has reportedly prompted American Oversight to demand that the US Justice Department conduct a “cross-agency investigation” into the improper wiping of phone records.
Speaking with CNN, American Oversight’s executive director Heather Sawyer said, “It’s just astounding to believe that the agency did not understand the importance of preserving its records — particularly [with regards] to the top officials that might have captured: what they were doing, when they were doing it, why they were doing, it on that day.”
Amanda Carpenter, a well-known Conservative commentator weighed in, writing:
So for those following, we have Secret Service agents’ texts disappeared, along with those belonging to top DoD and Army officials. Who is going to go on record as to exactly whose records were wiped, when, and how?
— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) August 2, 2022
FBI agent Peter Strzok said:
Acting SecDef Miller and Kash Patel of DOD join acting Sec DHS Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli – along with most of USSS – in having their Jan 6 texts deleted.
DOD received FOIA for the texts days after Jan 6.
Funny all these coincidences stacking up.https://t.co/vz4FWMd2BN
— Peter Strzok (@petestrzok) August 2, 2022
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi has released a statement after the scandal broke, claiming that agents had their phones wiped as part of a pre-planned replacement program that took off before the DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) had first made their request for the data, six weeks into the aftermath of the infamous Capitol attack.
“The Secret Service notified DHS OIG of the loss of certain phones’ data, but confirmed to OIG that none of the texts it was seeking had been lost in the migration,” Guglielmi’s statement on behalf of the US Secret Service said.
Read the full bombshell report from CNN here.
Featured image via Flickr/Inter-American Defense College, under Creative Commons license 2.0