Secret Service scrambling to explain deleted Jan. 6 texts to 'skeptical' House committee members: report

According to a report from the Guardian, Secret Service officials can't seem to get their story straight about why crucial texts on the day before and the day of the Jan 6th Capitol insurrection were deleted,

As the report notes, that has members of House select committee investigating Donald Trump and his links to the Capitol riot are skeptical about their claims.

According to the Guardian's Hugo Lowell, "The Secret Service’s account about how text messages from the day before and the day of the Capitol attack were erased has shifted several times, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security told the House January 6 select committee at a briefing on Friday."

The report notes that members were first told that the lost texts were the result of software upgrades only to later be informed that they vanished due to device replacements.

According to the inspector general who issued the bombshell report, the Secret Service is being less than transparent when asked for answers and has been stonewalling "by slow-walking production of materials."

"Members on the select committee were privately skeptical of the notion that the Secret Service managed to inadvertently erase key messages during a 10-day period that was among perhaps the most tumultuous for the agency, the participants said," the report states before adding, "If some of the texts were deliberately erased after the 16 January 2021 request, that could amount to obstruction of a congressional investigation, one of the select committee’s members added on Friday."

"The select committee has spent recent days trying to establish whether it was all texts from 5 January and 6 January 2021 that were lost or just some, exactly how the texts came to be erased, and whether additional days’ worth of texts from that month were missing," the Guardian's Lowell wrote. "The participants at the briefing said [IG Joseph] Cuffari was not able to provide clear answers on those questions, beyond the fact that he understood a proportion of texts from both the day before, and the day of, the Capitol attack remain unaccounted for."

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