Secret Service Denies Charges it Failed to Deliver ‘Erased’ Texts from January 6 to House Panel

The House Jan. 6 panel said that the Secret Service failed to deliver subpoenaed text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 which the panel said had been “erased.” However, the Secret Service has denied the charge, saying that the missing texts are accounted for by standard agency policy not to discuss security situations over text.

A cache of Secret Service agent text messages from the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, which had been subpoenaed by the House committee for delivery by the morning of July 20, did not contain texts from Jan. 5 and 6, which the committee considered crucial, according to panel member Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.).

“We received a letter today that did provide us with a lot of documents and some data. However, we did not receive the additional text messages that we were looking for,” Murphy said during a TV appearance.

The texts were allegedly “erased” after a device replacement program upgraded the mobile devices of Secret Service agents, Murphy said.

Murphy explained: “They moved ahead with their efforts to migrate the devices and the data, and their process, as explained to us, was simply to leave it to the agent to determine whether or not there was anything on their phones worth saving that was necessary to save for federal records. And as a result, today they did not receive any texts from their agents when they made that transition that was flagged for preservation.”

However, the Secret Service has denied the charge that they erased any text messages, a charge which was first reported to the Jan. 6 panel by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General Joseph Cuffari.

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi insisted in a statement to another media outlet that there were no “hidden messages” or

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