Key Jan. 6 Member Raskin Vows Committee Will ‘Get to the Bottom Of’ Deleted Secret Service Tweets
Maryland Congressman and key January 6 committee member Jamie Raskin vowed to “get to the bottom of” the thousands of text messages that Secret Service deleted.
On Friday morning’s edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-host Willie Geist asked Rep. Raskin about the news that Secret Service text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021 were deleted by the agency after they were told to preserve them.
Raskin promised to “get to the bottom” of the issue, but had no specifics to offer:
WILLIE GEIST: I want to ask you about this story about the Secret Service accused of deleting text messages, could be critical to the investigation of the events surrounding the attack. It was a letter this week to both the House and Senate Homeland Security Committees. DHS inspector general writing after his office requested full electronic records for an evaluation of the Capitol attack. The Secret Service deleted a significant number of text messages from January 5th and January 6th of 2021. NBC News obtained that letter after The Intercept first reported. The Secret Service denies the messages were deleted with any malicious intent. So the DHS, IG sent this to you all on the committee as well. What more can you tell us about those text messages, why they were deleted and what you are looking to find in them?
REP. RASKIN: Thanks for having me. Look, we don’t know anything more than what you just reported at this point. It’s obviously an alarming thing to learn that there were Secret Service text messages from January 6 itself and also the day before that were deleted as part of a device replacement program. We don’t know what the facts are, and we’re going to get to the facts about why that happened. And we’re going to do whatever we can to retrieve the substance of those texts. And, you know, fortunately, the chair of our committee, Bennie Thompson, is also the chair of the Homeland Security Committee. So he’s very well-versed in this kind of thing. And we’ll get to the bottom of it.
WILLIE GEIST: And clearly, those are critical texts from the 5th and the 6th, giving Kassidy Hutchinson’s testimony about what she reports to have heard from Secret Service agents about the president’s behavior on the 6 specifically. So we’ll look for more on that.
Co-host Mika Brzezinski went on to helpfully point out, “By the way, there are ways to retrieve deleted texts. If for some reason the Secret Service has a policy of deleting texts, it just seems wild that anyone in the US Secret Service would have a policy of deleting text messages. I don’t know. It seems weird, but there are ways to get them back. A number of different ones.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
