BLOG POST JULY 29, 2022, FRIDAY
PROGRESSIVE OPINION AND NEWS
LUCY MANESS WARNER
DOJ, ARE YOU READING THE PAPERS? THAT'S YOU,
MERRICK GARLAND. AND WHERE ARE THE DOJ EMAILS AND TEXTS FOR THE MONTHS AFTER
THE ELECTION DAY AND UP TO JAN. 5 AND 6? HAS THE JANUARY 6 COMMITTEE ASKED FOR
THEM? AS FOR THOSE DELETED TEXTS, MAYBE THE RUSSIANS CAN FIND THEM. WE SHOULD
ASK PUTIN. ALL THREE STORIES ARE BELOW, BUT FIRST SOME HISTORY ON THE
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, FOUR ARTICLES IN TOTAL.
*https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/28/homeland-security-texts-jan6/
17 hours ago
*https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/29/politics/secret-service-missing-texts-january-6-dhs-inspector-general/index.html
57 mins ago *https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/29/jan6-texts-data-security/
6 mins ago
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/23/1106966953/former-doj-officials-to-testify-during-the-5th-house-jan-6-hearing
LAW
Former DOJ officials to testify during the 5th
House Jan. 6 hearing
June 23, 2022 7:20 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
STEVE INSKEEP
CARRIE JOHNSON
The House Select Committee investigating the
Capitol siege will focus on efforts by former President Donald Trump to
pressure the Justice Department to pursue baseless claims of election fraud.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Each day of hearings on January 6 explores a
different way that a former president tried to undermine this republic.
LEILA FADEL, HOST: On Tuesday, Republican state officials testified that Donald Trump asked them to violate their oaths of office. Today, the hearings focus on the Department of Justice. Trump's own appointees to run the department have said he wanted them to promote election lies.
INSKEEP: NPR national justice correspondent Carrie
Johnson is covering the hearings. Carrie, good morning.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: Why do the former president's own
appointees say that he went too far at DOJ?
JOHNSON: Well, the Justice Department is not
supposed to do the personal political bidding of the president, but that's
exactly what we're likely to hear today from the committee, that the former
president misused this department to try to cling to power, doing things like
trying to get Justice to appoint a special counsel to probe nonexistent fraud.
We know former Attorney General Bill Barr told Trump all these claims about
election fraud were nonsense. Barr resigned in December 2020, but right after
that, former President Trump started putting the squeeze on other top officials
at Justice. There were something like nine calls or meetings demanding DOJ officials
investigate fraud claims over the course of just a few weeks. Here's how the
acting deputy attorney general, Rich Donoghue, put it in a deposition.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RICH DONOGHUE: And I said something to the effect
of, sir, we've done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews. The major
allegations are not supported by the evidence developed.
JOHNSON: Donoghue says he told the former president
he was dead wrong when he made claims about fraud in Georgia, for example.
INSKEEP: Yeah, we've already seen the video of that
deposition. Now he testifies in person before the committee today. Is he the
only person who is saying this?
JOHNSON: No. We expect to see former acting
Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Steve Engel, who led the Office of Legal
Counsel at Justice. It's unusual for lawyers at this level to testify in public
about interactions with the White House, but the current president, Joe Biden,
decided that executive privilege should not apply to shield these conversations
about an effort to overthrow the 2020 election. One person we're not going to
be hearing from today is former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark. He's described as
being sympathetic to Trump's baseless claims of fraud and also drafting a
letter to officials in Georgia to try to help Trump's cause. Clark did appear
for a deposition, but he invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against
self-incrimination there.
INSKEEP: Now, why would Clark need to invoke the
Fifth Amendment?
JOHNSON: Well, an investigation by the Senate
Judiciary Committee found Clark was going around his boss at the Justice
Department, taking private meetings with the White House and at least one
Republican member of Congress, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania. Trump had seriously
considered whether to fire Jeff Rosen and install Jeff Clark as the acting
attorney general. Steve, this all came to a head only three days before January
6. In a bizarre meeting at the White House some people have likened to Trump's
old reality TV show "The Apprentice," virtually the entire DOJ
leadership team threatened to resign if Trump gave Jeff Clark the job. Here's
again what Rich Donoghue told the committee.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONOGHUE: The president said, suppose I do this.
Suppose I replace Jeff Rosen with him, Jeff Clark. What do you do? And I said,
sir, I would resign immediately. There is no way I'm serving one minute under
this guy, Jeff Clark.
JOHNSON: The prospect of Justice Department
officials resigning in protest, of course, has a historical precedent, Steve.
It happened 49 years ago during Watergate. We call it the Saturday Night
Massacre. That was avoided here narrowly by some of the men we're going to hear
from testify today.
INSKEEP: OK. We'll be listening. Carrie, thanks so
much.
JOHNSON: Thank you.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Carrie Johnson.
Copyright © 2022 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit
our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further
information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by
an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or
revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative
record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
THE DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK. INTERESTINGLY, THE SECRET
SERVICE GIVES A VIRTUALLY IDENTICAL STORY EXCEPT THAT THEY CLAIM THE CAT DID
IT. WELL, WHILE A DOG WILL EAT ALMOST ANYTHING, A CAT CERTAINLY WON'T. ANYBODY
WHO THINKS THAT HAS NEVER HAD A CAT. "MMMNOT MMUNGRY!"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/28/homeland-security-texts-jan6/
Jan. 6 texts missing for Trump Homeland Security’s
Wolf and Cuccinelli
DHS watchdog was alerted in February to unavailable
records of top officials, but did nothing to alert or investigate
By Carol D. Leonnig and Maria Sacchetti
July 28, 2022 at 9:41 p.m. EDT
PHOTOGRAPH -- Chad Wolf, a former Homeland Security
leader, at a policy summit in Washington, D.C., on July 25. (Al Drago/Bloomberg
News)
Chad Wolf, a former Homeland Security leader, at a
policy summit in Washington, D.C., on July 25. (Al Drago/Bloomberg News)
Text messages for President Donald Trump’s acting
homeland security secretary Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken
Cuccinelli are missing for a key period leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack
on the U.S. Capitol, according to four people briefed on the matter and
internal emails.
This discovery of missing records for the
senior-most Homeland Security officials, which has not been previously
reported, increases the volume of potential evidence that has vanished
regarding the time around the Capitol attack.
It comes as both congressional and criminal
investigators at the Justice Department seek to piece together an effort by Trump
and his allies to overturn the results of the election, which culminated in a
pro-Trump rally that became a violent riot in the halls of Congress.
VIDEO -- Understanding the DOJ’s Jan. 6 probe into
Trump, 1:39 MIN., The Justice Department is examining President Donald Trump’s
conduct relating to its Jan. 6 insurrection criminal probe. (Video: Blair
Guild/The Washington Post)
The Department of Homeland Security notified the
agency’s inspector general in late February that Wolf’s and Cuccinelli’s texts
were lost in a “reset” of their government phones when they left their jobs in
January 2021 in preparation for the new Biden administration, according to an
internal record obtained by the Project on Government Oversight and shared with
The Washington Post.
The office of the department’s undersecretary of management
also told the government watchdog that the text messages for its boss,
Undersecretary Randolph “Tex” Alles, the former Secret Service director, were
also no longer available due to a previously planned phone reset.
The Office of Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari did not
press the department leadership at that time to explain why they did not
preserve these records, nor seek ways to recover the lost data, according to
the four people briefed on the watchdog’s actions. Cuffari also failed to alert
Congress to the potential destruction of government records.
The revelation comes on the heels of the discovery that
text messages of Secret Service agents — critical firsthand witnesses to the
events leading up to Jan. 6 — were deleted more than a year ago and may never
be recovered.
The news of their missing records set off a firestorm
because the texts could have corroborated the account of a former White House
aide describing the president’s state of mind on Jan. 6. In one case, the aide,
Cassidy Hutchinson, said a top official told her that Trump had tried to attack
a senior Secret Service agent who refused to take the president to the Capitol
with his supporters marching there.
In a nearly identical scenario to that of the DHS leaders’
texts, the Secret Service alerted Cuffari’s office seven months ago, in December
2021, that the agency had deleted thousands of agents’ and employees’ text
messages in an agencywide reset of government phones. Cuffari’s office did not
notify Congress until mid-July, despite multiple congressional committees’
pending requests for these records.
The telephone and text communications of Wolf and
Cuccinelli in the days leading up to Jan. 6 could have shed considerable light
on Trump’s actions and plans. In the weeks before the attack on the Capitol,
Trump had been pressuring both men to help him claim the 2020 election results
were rigged and even to seize voting machines in key swing states to try to
“re-run” the election.
“It is extremely troubling that the issue of deleted text
messages related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol is not limited to the
Secret Service, but also includes Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, who were
running DHS at the time,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie G.
Thompson (D-Miss.) said in a statement.
“It appears the DHS Inspector General has known about these
deleted texts for months but failed to notify Congress,” Thompson said. “If the
Inspector General had informed Congress, we may have been able to get better
records from Senior administration officials regarding one of the most tragic
days in our democracy’s history.”
Neither Cuccinelli nor Wolf responded to requests for
comment. DHS’s Office of Inspector General did not immediately respond to
requests for comment.
On Twitter, Wolf wrote: “I complied with all data retention
laws and returned all my equipment fully loaded to the Department. Full stop.
DHS has all my texts, emails, phone logs, schedules, etc. Any issues with
missing data needs to be addressed to DHS.”
The discovery of missing records for the top officials
running the Department of Homeland Security during the final days of the Trump
administration raises new questions about what could have been learned, and
about what other text messages and evidence the department and other agencies
may have erased, in apparent violation of the Federal Records Act.
Wolf and Cuccinelli remained at DHS as Trump openly
challenged the 2020 election results, even though the agency led efforts to
help state and local governments safeguard the integrity of the election
results.
Starting in late December, numerous DHS intelligence units
across the country were warning of extremely worrisome chatter in white
nationalist and pro-Trump social media platforms that were promoting coming
armed to Trump’s Jan. 6 rally and using violence to block Joe Biden from
becoming president.
In late December, Trump railed in a Cabinet meeting that
his secretaries were failing to properly help him investigate fraud that had
corruptly “given” the election to Biden, but cited unsubstantiated claims.
Trump fired Christopher Krebs as director of the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency in a tweet after Krebs countered Trump’s claims
of widespread election fraud, and he complained that Wolf should have moved
faster to force Krebs out.
On New Year’s Eve of 2020, Trump also called Cuccinelli to
pressure him to seize voting machines in swing states and help him block the
peaceful transfer of power. Trump falsely told him that the acting attorney
general had just said that it was Cuccinelli’s job to seize voting machines
“and you’re not doing your job.”
Cuccinelli was in Washington on the day of the attack and
toured the Capitol that night to survey the damage. Wolf was on an official
trip to the Middle East.
After the Capitol attack, several lawmakers called for
hearings into why DHS had failed to anticipate the threat Trump supporters
posed to Congress on the day lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence planned to
certify the election results.
Wolf resigned five days after the attack on the Capitol,
citing “recent events” as well as legal rulings questioning his legitimacy to
continue leading the department as an acting secretary for 14 months.
“Effective 11:59 p.m. today, I am stepping down as your
Acting Secretary,” Wolf wrote in a message to the department. “I am saddened to
take this step, as it was my intention to serve the Department until the end of
this Administration.”
In an interview days later with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the
departing acting secretary said Trump bore some responsibility for the events
of Jan. 6.
“I was disappointed that the president didn’t speak out
sooner on that. I think he had a role to do that. I think, unfortunately, the
administration lost a little bit of the moral high ground on this issue by not
coming out sooner on it,” he said of Trump not swiftly condemning the violence.
A Government Accountability Office report in 2020 found
that Wolf and Cuccinelli were ineligible to serve in their positions because
their appointments had not followed the proper order of succession, an issue
the GAO referred to the DHS Office of Inspector General.
Unlike Trump, Wolf did not dispute the election results and
said DHS was preparing for the “orderly and smooth transition to
President-elect Biden’s DHS team.”
“Welcome them, educate them, and learn from them,” Wolf
said then. “They are your leaders for the next four years — a time which
undoubtedly will be full of challenges and opportunities to show the American
public the value of DHS and why it is worth the investment.”
Wolf had emerged as Trump’s favorite DHS chief, the
president’s fourth pick for the job in just four years in office. Trump
promoted his first secretary, John Kelly, to be his White House chief of staff,
then pushed Kelly out of that job for not complying with his orders. He fired
Kelly’s successor, Kirstjen Nielsen, for balking at some of Trump’s demands for
how to handle immigrants crossing the border, which Nielsen knew were illegal.
The third secretary, Nielsen’s successor, Kevin McAleenan,
grew frustrated by the way Trump tried to politicize the department during his
reelection effort and departed after just seven months. Then Trump named Wolf
as his acting secretary and found that the fourth time was a charm. Wolf
repeatedly touted Trump’s immigration record as stellar and deployed department
personnel to tamp down Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Ore., to help
promote Trump’s law-and-order message to voters.
Trump appointed Cuccinelli to key DHS roles after seeing
him defend his immigration agenda on television.
Trump allies still believe Wolf served him well. Wolf is
among those mentioned this month in an Axios article as someone whom Trump
could ask to return to government service if Trump successfully runs for
president in 2024.
8589 Comments
By Carol D. Leonnig
Carol Leonnig is an investigative reporter at The
Washington Post, where she has worked since 2000. She won the 2015 Pulitzer
Prize for her work on security failures and misconduct inside the Secret
Service. Twitter
By Maria Sacchetti
Maria Sacchetti covers immigration for the Washington Post,
including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the court system. She
previously reported for the Boston Globe, where her work led to the release of
several immigrants from jail. She lived for several years in Latin America and
is fluent in Spanish. Twitter
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THE INSPECTOR GENERAL OF DHS WITHHELD THE INFORMATION ON
THE MISSING TEXTS FROM CONGRESS UNTIL THE PROPER TIME, WHICH APPARENTLY WAS
AFTER CASSIDY HUTCHINSON TESTIFIED IN PAINFUL DETAIL ABOUT THE EVENTS IN THE
WHITE HOUSE AND ENOUGH ABOUT THE SECRET SERVICE TO POINT TO THE NEED FOR ALL
BACKUP DOCUMENTATION THERE AS WELL. WILL THERE BE WITNESSES WITHIN DHS WHO CAN
GIVE THE SAME KIND OF INFORMATION ABOUT THEIR WORKINGS APPROACHING THE 6TH?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/29/politics/secret-service-missing-texts-january-6-dhs-inspector-general/index.html
Exclusive: DHS inspector general knew of missing Secret
Service texts months earlier than previously known
By Whitney Wild, Zachary Cohen, Jeremy Herb and Priscilla
Alvarez, CNN
Updated 8:17 PM EDT, Fri July 29, 2022
VIDEO -- Nefarious or incompetence: former January 6, 01:29
MIN.
The embattled inspector general for the Department of
Homeland Security first learned of missing Secret Service text messages in May
2021 – months earlier than previously known and more than a year before he
alerted the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, that
potentially crucial information may have been erased, according to multiple
sources familiar with the matter.
Earlier this month, Secret Service officials told
congressional committees that DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, the
department’s independent watchdog, was aware that texts had been erased in
December 2021. But sources tell CNN, the Secret Service had notified Cuffari’s
office of missing text messages in May 2021, seven months earlier.
The Secret Service now says the texts were lost as a result
of a previously scheduled data migration of its agents’ cell phones that began
on January 27, 2021, exactly three weeks after the attack on the US Capitol.
After the data migration was completed, in May 2021 the Secret Service told
Cuffari’s office that they tried to contact a cellular provider to retrieve the
texts when they realized they were lost, a source told CNN.
The source added that key Secret Service personnel didn’t
realize data was permanently lost until after the data migration was completed,
and erroneously believed the data was backed up. In July 2021, inspector
general investigators told DHS they were no longer seeking Secret Service text
messages, according to two sources. Cuffari’s office then restarted its probe
in December 2021.
PHOTOGRAPH -- DHS Inspector General Jospeph Cuffari
These new details come as Cuffari faces mounting pressure
from key Democrats to hand off his investigation into the missing messages.
They also come amid revelations that text messages for the two top DHS
officials under former President Donald Trump, acting Secretary Chad Wolf and
acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli, are missing for a key period leading up
to the January 6 attack.
The Washington Post first reported the missing Wolf and
Cuccinelli texts, which were lost in a “reset” of their government phones when
they left their jobs in January 2021 in preparation for the new Biden
administration, according to the Post.
Wolf said in a tweet Thursday that he “complied with all
data retention laws and returned all my equipment fully loaded to the
Department. Full stop. DHS has all my texts, emails, phone logs, schedules,
etc. Any issues with missing data needs to be addressed to DHS. To imply otherwise
is lazy reporting.”
Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, an Illinois
Democrat, called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate the missing
messages from the lead-up to January 6. The Justice Department did not
immediately respond to a request for comment.
The missing messages exploded into public view earlier this
month when Cuffari sent a letter to congressional committees saying that Secret
Service texts had been erased, kicking off the frantic set of events that now
has sparked a criminal investigation and pointed demands for answers from
Congress.
Cuffari’s letter came after Trump White House aide Cassidy
Hutchinson testified to the January 6 committee about an angry confrontation
between former President Donald Trump and his Secret Service detail on January
6, 2021.
The committee and Cuffari are both interested in the texts
because they could shed light on the Secret Service’s response to January 6.
Conflicting requests for information
Amid the heightened scrutiny, the Secret Service has
curtailed its cooperation with the January 6 committee related to the missing
texts, two sources tell CNN. Secret Service lawyers, along with DHS attorneys,
are working to determine how to respond to and prioritize three conflicting
requests for information about the missing records from the House select
committee, the National Archives and the DHS inspector general.
The Service told the committee last week by phone about the
need to pause cooperation prior to the panel’s July 21 primetime hearing, one of
the sources said. The committee had issued a subpoena on July 15 to the Service
for text messages and other records surrounding January 6.
US Secret Service Director James Murray listens during a
press conference about the Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center's
Mass Attacks in Public Spaces 2018 report, July 9, 2019, in Alexandria,
Virginia.
RELATED ARTICLE -- Secret Service director delaying
retirement amid investigations into agency
On July 20, Cuffari’s office, which operates independently
of DHS, told the Service to stop investigating the missing records, saying that
it could interfere with the inspector general’s own probe, which it wrote was
an “ongoing criminal investigation.”
In addition to the January 6 committee’s subpoena, the
National Archives separately demanded that the Secret Service turn over
relevant records and explain what might have happened to any deleted text
messages.
Sources familiar with the situation said they were not sure
how long it will take for Secret Service lawyers to determine whether to share
records with the committee – and whether this would be resolved within a few
days or stretch on for weeks.
A source tells CNN the Secret Service is continuing to give
records from older requests to the Committee but acknowledged the agency has
stopped any new investigative work to find the content of text messages that
were lost.
In a statement to CNN, a Secret Service spokesperson said
the agency “will continue our unwavering cooperation with the Select Committee
and other inquiries.”
Reps. Zoe Lofgren of California and Elaine Luria of
Virginia, who serve on the January 6 committee, have both said publicly the
Secret Service handed over documents this week. And the committee’s chairman,
Democratic Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, said Thursday that the panel
received “several hundred thousand” exhibits from the Secret Service two days
ago. Thompson said the panel is still reviewing the material and doesn’t know if
it contains any new text messages.
When Cuffari met with the committee two weeks ago, Thompson
said, he did not tell the committee that the potential deletion of Secret
Service text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, was under criminal
investigation.
Thompson said he is still waiting to see how the criminal
investigation impacts what information the committee can receive, but he does
not believe the criminal investigation is affecting the committee’s
investigation at this point.
“My understanding of the process is that if you’re involved
in a criminal thing, that certain information that you’re not able to share,”
Thompson said. “As to where the breaks are with respect to the criminal
investigation, I guess we’ll just have to see at some point.”
Neither DHS nor the DHS Inspector General’s Office
responded to a request for comment.
Congressional calls for recusal
The potential impasse between the Secret Service and the
January 6 committee comes after Thompson called for Cuffari to recuse himself
from the probe into the possible deletion of text messages.
RELATED ARTICLE -- Bennie Thompson and Carolyn Maloney.
Democratic chairs call for inspector general to recuse himself in Secret
Service texts probe
Thompson and House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney sent a
letter to Cuffari on Tuesday saying his failure to inform Congress that the
Secret Service wasn’t providing records “cast serious doubt on his independence
and his ability to effectively conduct such an important investigation.”
Asked Thursday if Cuffari was misleading the committee,
Thompson said, “It appears that the IG is potentially at issue with the conduct
of his investigation.”
In a sign of the communication breakdown between
congressional Democrats and Cuffari, the House Homeland Security Committee,
which Thompson also chairs, was never informed by the inspector general that he
was conducting a criminal investigation into the Secret Service text messages,
according to a source familiar with the matter.
The missing messages exploded into public view this month
when the inspector general revealed the issue in a letter to Congress. The
letter came after Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the
committee about an angry confrontation Trump and his Secret Service detail on
January 6.
Timeline takes shape
The issue of the potential missing text messages dates to
January 2021, when the Secret Service began its previously planned phone data
migration.
On January 16, 2021, before the data migration occurred,
the chairs of four House committees sent a letter to DHS and other relevant
agencies instructing them to preserve records related to January 6. While
Secret Service is part of DHS, it remains unclear whether the agency received
the guidance, which did not specifically reference them.
PHOTOGRAPH -- Members of the Secret Service patrol from the
roof of the White House as US President Donald Trump speaks to supporters from
The Ellipse on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. - Thousands of Trump
supporters, fueled by his spurious claims of voter fraud, are flooding the
nation's capital protesting the expected certification of Joe Biden's White
House victory by the US Congress. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL
NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
RELATED STORY -- First on CNN: Secret Service identified
potential missing text messages on phones of 10 individuals
A source familiar with the investigation told CNN the Secret
Service spent roughly eight hours last week searching for the notice, but never
found it.
Nine days after the letter was sent, the Secret Service
sent a reminder to employees that a data migration would wipe employees’
phones. The January 25, 2021, notice to employees made clear that employees
were responsible for saving records.
The Secret Service began the data migration two days later,
on January 27.
A source told CNN the Secret Service realized too late that
the data was permanently deleted. The agency attempted to retrieve lost text
messages from its cellphone provider, but it was unable to do so, the source
said.
In June 2021, Cuffari requested records and texts from the
24 Secret Service employees involved with relevant actions on January 6. CNN
has previously reported that the heads of Trump and Pence’s security details
are among the 24 individuals.
But then in July 2021, a deputy inspector general told the
Department of Homeland Security the office was no longer seeking the text
messages from the Secret Service, according to two sources.
Sources told CNN the Secret Service believed the issue had
concluded at that point. But the inspector general reopened his inquiry into
the text messages in December 2021, one source said.
Skepticism rising
While the Democratic committee chairs have questioned
whether Cuffari, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, could lead the Secret
Service investigation, House lawmakers on the select committee have also raised
suspicions over how the Secret Service might have allowed for messages to be
deleted after January 6 – noting that multiple congressional committee had
requested agency records before a phone migration led to their possible
deletion.
“Count me a skeptic,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland
Democrat on the panel, on CBS’ “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on Monday.
Raskin said that he does not believe “for one minute” that the Secret Service
cannot find the texts the agents made on January 6.
PHOTOGRAPH -- U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD)
CNN reported last week that the Secret Service had
identified 10 individuals with metadata showing text messages were sent or
received around January 6, and the agency was trying to determine whether the
content contained relevant information that should have been preserved.
The inspector general’s letter last week notifying the
Secret Service of the potential criminal investigation halted those efforts.
The Secret Service suggested in its statement acknowledging
the letter that it may not be able to comply with both the inspector general’s
directive and the committee’s subpoena. The agency said that it would “conduct
a thorough legal review to ensure we are fully cooperative with all oversight
efforts and that they do not conflict with each other.”
DOES THIS STATEMENT SOUND AS THOUGH THE SECRET SERVICE CONSIDERS ITSELF TO BE A PRIVATE ARMY FOR THE PRESIDENT OR VICE PRESIDENT?
THE DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK. INTERESTINGLY, THE SECRET SERVICE GIVES A VIRTUALLY IDENTICAL STORY EXCEPT THAT THEY CLAIM THE CAT DID IT. WELL, WHILE A DOG WILL EAT ALMOST ANYTHING, A CAT CERTAINLY WON'T. ANYBODY WHO THINKS THAT HAS NEVER HAD A CAT. "MMMNOT MMUNGRY!"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/28/homeland-security-texts-jan6/
Jan. 6 texts missing for Trump Homeland Security’s
Wolf and Cuccinelli
DHS watchdog was alerted in February to unavailable
records of top officials, but did nothing to alert or investigate
By Carol D. Leonnig and Maria Sacchetti
July 28, 2022 at 9:41 p.m. EDT
PHOTOGRAPH -- Chad Wolf, a former Homeland Security
leader, at a policy summit in Washington, D.C., on July 25. (Al Drago/Bloomberg
News)
Chad Wolf, a former Homeland Security leader, at a
policy summit in Washington, D.C., on July 25. (Al Drago/Bloomberg News)
Text messages for President Donald Trump’s acting
homeland security secretary Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken
Cuccinelli are missing for a key period leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack
on the U.S. Capitol, according to four people briefed on the matter and
internal emails.
This discovery of missing records for the
senior-most Homeland Security officials, which has not been previously
reported, increases the volume of potential evidence that has vanished
regarding the time around the Capitol attack.
It comes as both congressional and criminal
investigators at the Justice Department seek to piece together an effort by Trump
and his allies to overturn the results of the election, which culminated in a
pro-Trump rally that became a violent riot in the halls of Congress.
VIDEO -- Understanding the DOJ’s Jan. 6 probe into
Trump, 1:39 MIN., The Justice Department is examining President Donald Trump’s
conduct relating to its Jan. 6 insurrection criminal probe. (Video: Blair
Guild/The Washington Post)
The Department of Homeland Security notified the
agency’s inspector general in late February that Wolf’s and Cuccinelli’s texts
were lost in a “reset” of their government phones when they left their jobs in
January 2021 in preparation for the new Biden administration, according to an
internal record obtained by the Project on Government Oversight and shared with
The Washington Post.
The office of the department’s undersecretary of management
also told the government watchdog that the text messages for its boss,
Undersecretary Randolph “Tex” Alles, the former Secret Service director, were
also no longer available due to a previously planned phone reset.
The Office of Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari did not
press the department leadership at that time to explain why they did not
preserve these records, nor seek ways to recover the lost data, according to
the four people briefed on the watchdog’s actions. Cuffari also failed to alert
Congress to the potential destruction of government records.
The revelation comes on the heels of the discovery that
text messages of Secret Service agents — critical firsthand witnesses to the
events leading up to Jan. 6 — were deleted more than a year ago and may never
be recovered.
The news of their missing records set off a firestorm
because the texts could have corroborated the account of a former White House
aide describing the president’s state of mind on Jan. 6. In one case, the aide,
Cassidy Hutchinson, said a top official told her that Trump had tried to attack
a senior Secret Service agent who refused to take the president to the Capitol
with his supporters marching there.
In a nearly identical scenario to that of the DHS leaders’
texts, the Secret Service alerted Cuffari’s office seven months ago, in December
2021, that the agency had deleted thousands of agents’ and employees’ text
messages in an agencywide reset of government phones. Cuffari’s office did not
notify Congress until mid-July, despite multiple congressional committees’
pending requests for these records.
The telephone and text communications of Wolf and
Cuccinelli in the days leading up to Jan. 6 could have shed considerable light
on Trump’s actions and plans. In the weeks before the attack on the Capitol,
Trump had been pressuring both men to help him claim the 2020 election results
were rigged and even to seize voting machines in key swing states to try to
“re-run” the election.
“It is extremely troubling that the issue of deleted text
messages related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol is not limited to the
Secret Service, but also includes Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, who were
running DHS at the time,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie G.
Thompson (D-Miss.) said in a statement.
“It appears the DHS Inspector General has known about these
deleted texts for months but failed to notify Congress,” Thompson said. “If the
Inspector General had informed Congress, we may have been able to get better
records from Senior administration officials regarding one of the most tragic
days in our democracy’s history.”
Neither Cuccinelli nor Wolf responded to requests for
comment. DHS’s Office of Inspector General did not immediately respond to
requests for comment.
On Twitter, Wolf wrote: “I complied with all data retention
laws and returned all my equipment fully loaded to the Department. Full stop.
DHS has all my texts, emails, phone logs, schedules, etc. Any issues with
missing data needs to be addressed to DHS.”
The discovery of missing records for the top officials
running the Department of Homeland Security during the final days of the Trump
administration raises new questions about what could have been learned, and
about what other text messages and evidence the department and other agencies
may have erased, in apparent violation of the Federal Records Act.
Wolf and Cuccinelli remained at DHS as Trump openly
challenged the 2020 election results, even though the agency led efforts to
help state and local governments safeguard the integrity of the election
results.
Starting in late December, numerous DHS intelligence units
across the country were warning of extremely worrisome chatter in white
nationalist and pro-Trump social media platforms that were promoting coming
armed to Trump’s Jan. 6 rally and using violence to block Joe Biden from
becoming president.
In late December, Trump railed in a Cabinet meeting that
his secretaries were failing to properly help him investigate fraud that had
corruptly “given” the election to Biden, but cited unsubstantiated claims.
Trump fired Christopher Krebs as director of the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency in a tweet after Krebs countered Trump’s claims
of widespread election fraud, and he complained that Wolf should have moved
faster to force Krebs out.
On New Year’s Eve of 2020, Trump also called Cuccinelli to
pressure him to seize voting machines in swing states and help him block the
peaceful transfer of power. Trump falsely told him that the acting attorney
general had just said that it was Cuccinelli’s job to seize voting machines
“and you’re not doing your job.”
Cuccinelli was in Washington on the day of the attack and
toured the Capitol that night to survey the damage. Wolf was on an official
trip to the Middle East.
After the Capitol attack, several lawmakers called for
hearings into why DHS had failed to anticipate the threat Trump supporters
posed to Congress on the day lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence planned to
certify the election results.
Wolf resigned five days after the attack on the Capitol,
citing “recent events” as well as legal rulings questioning his legitimacy to
continue leading the department as an acting secretary for 14 months.
“Effective 11:59 p.m. today, I am stepping down as your
Acting Secretary,” Wolf wrote in a message to the department. “I am saddened to
take this step, as it was my intention to serve the Department until the end of
this Administration.”
In an interview days later with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the
departing acting secretary said Trump bore some responsibility for the events
of Jan. 6.
“I was disappointed that the president didn’t speak out
sooner on that. I think he had a role to do that. I think, unfortunately, the
administration lost a little bit of the moral high ground on this issue by not
coming out sooner on it,” he said of Trump not swiftly condemning the violence.
A Government Accountability Office report in 2020 found
that Wolf and Cuccinelli were ineligible to serve in their positions because
their appointments had not followed the proper order of succession, an issue
the GAO referred to the DHS Office of Inspector General.
Unlike Trump, Wolf did not dispute the election results and
said DHS was preparing for the “orderly and smooth transition to
President-elect Biden’s DHS team.”
“Welcome them, educate them, and learn from them,” Wolf
said then. “They are your leaders for the next four years — a time which
undoubtedly will be full of challenges and opportunities to show the American
public the value of DHS and why it is worth the investment.”
Wolf had emerged as Trump’s favorite DHS chief, the
president’s fourth pick for the job in just four years in office. Trump
promoted his first secretary, John Kelly, to be his White House chief of staff,
then pushed Kelly out of that job for not complying with his orders. He fired
Kelly’s successor, Kirstjen Nielsen, for balking at some of Trump’s demands for
how to handle immigrants crossing the border, which Nielsen knew were illegal.
The third secretary, Nielsen’s successor, Kevin McAleenan,
grew frustrated by the way Trump tried to politicize the department during his
reelection effort and departed after just seven months. Then Trump named Wolf
as his acting secretary and found that the fourth time was a charm. Wolf
repeatedly touted Trump’s immigration record as stellar and deployed department
personnel to tamp down Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Ore., to help
promote Trump’s law-and-order message to voters.
Trump appointed Cuccinelli to key DHS roles after seeing
him defend his immigration agenda on television.
Trump allies still believe Wolf served him well. Wolf is
among those mentioned this month in an Axios article as someone whom Trump
could ask to return to government service if Trump successfully runs for
president in 2024.
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By Carol D. Leonnig
Carol Leonnig is an investigative reporter at The
Washington Post, where she has worked since 2000. She won the 2015 Pulitzer
Prize for her work on security failures and misconduct inside the Secret
Service. Twitter
By Maria Sacchetti
Maria Sacchetti covers immigration for the Washington Post,
including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the court system. She
previously reported for the Boston Globe, where her work led to the release of
several immigrants from jail. She lived for several years in Latin America and
is fluent in Spanish. Twitter
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THE INSPECTOR GENERAL OF DHS WITHHELD THE INFORMATION ON
THE MISSING TEXTS FROM CONGRESS UNTIL THE PROPER TIME, WHICH APPARENTLY WAS
AFTER CASSIDY HUTCHINSON TESTIFIED IN PAINFUL DETAIL ABOUT THE EVENTS IN THE
WHITE HOUSE AND ENOUGH ABOUT THE SECRET SERVICE TO POINT TO THE NEED FOR ALL
BACKUP DOCUMENTATION THERE AS WELL. WILL THERE BE WITNESSES WITHIN DHS WHO CAN
GIVE THE SAME KIND OF INFORMATION ABOUT THEIR WORKINGS APPROACHING THE 6TH?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/29/politics/secret-service-missing-texts-january-6-dhs-inspector-general/index.html
Exclusive: DHS inspector general knew of missing Secret
Service texts months earlier than previously known
By Whitney Wild, Zachary Cohen, Jeremy Herb and Priscilla
Alvarez, CNN
Updated 8:17 PM EDT, Fri July 29, 2022
VIDEO -- Nefarious or incompetence: former January 6, 01:29
MIN.
The embattled inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security first learned of missing Secret Service text messages in May 2021 – months earlier than previously known and more than a year before he alerted the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, that potentially crucial information may have been erased, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
Earlier this month, Secret Service officials told congressional committees that DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, the department’s independent watchdog, was aware that texts had been erased in December 2021. But sources tell CNN, the Secret Service had notified Cuffari’s office of missing text messages in May 2021, seven months earlier.
The Secret Service now says the texts were lost as a result of a previously scheduled data migration of its agents’ cell phones that began on January 27, 2021, exactly three weeks after the attack on the US Capitol. After the data migration was completed, in May 2021 the Secret Service told Cuffari’s office that they tried to contact a cellular provider to retrieve the texts when they realized they were lost, a source told CNN.
The source added that key Secret Service personnel didn’t realize data was permanently lost until after the data migration was completed, and erroneously believed the data was backed up. In July 2021, inspector general investigators told DHS they were no longer seeking Secret Service text messages, according to two sources. Cuffari’s office then restarted its probe in December 2021.
PHOTOGRAPH -- DHS Inspector General Jospeph Cuffari
These new details come as Cuffari faces mounting pressure from key Democrats to hand off his investigation into the missing messages. They also come amid revelations that text messages for the two top DHS officials under former President Donald Trump, acting Secretary Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli, are missing for a key period leading up to the January 6 attack.
The Washington Post first reported the missing Wolf and Cuccinelli texts, which were lost in a “reset” of their government phones when they left their jobs in January 2021 in preparation for the new Biden administration, according to the Post.
Wolf said in a tweet Thursday that he “complied with all data retention laws and returned all my equipment fully loaded to the Department. Full stop. DHS has all my texts, emails, phone logs, schedules, etc. Any issues with missing data needs to be addressed to DHS. To imply otherwise is lazy reporting.”
Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate the missing messages from the lead-up to January 6. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The missing messages exploded into public view earlier this month when Cuffari sent a letter to congressional committees saying that Secret Service texts had been erased, kicking off the frantic set of events that now has sparked a criminal investigation and pointed demands for answers from Congress.
Cuffari’s letter came after Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the January 6 committee about an angry confrontation between former President Donald Trump and his Secret Service detail on January 6, 2021.
The committee and Cuffari are both interested in the texts because they could shed light on the Secret Service’s response to January 6.
Conflicting requests for information
Amid the heightened scrutiny, the Secret Service has curtailed its cooperation with the January 6 committee related to the missing texts, two sources tell CNN. Secret Service lawyers, along with DHS attorneys, are working to determine how to respond to and prioritize three conflicting requests for information about the missing records from the House select committee, the National Archives and the DHS inspector general.
The Service told the committee last week by phone about the need to pause cooperation prior to the panel’s July 21 primetime hearing, one of the sources said. The committee had issued a subpoena on July 15 to the Service for text messages and other records surrounding January 6.
US Secret Service Director James Murray listens during a press conference about the Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center's Mass Attacks in Public Spaces 2018 report, July 9, 2019, in Alexandria, Virginia.
RELATED ARTICLE -- Secret Service director delaying retirement amid investigations into agency
On July 20, Cuffari’s office, which operates independently of DHS, told the Service to stop investigating the missing records, saying that it could interfere with the inspector general’s own probe, which it wrote was an “ongoing criminal investigation.”
In addition to the January 6 committee’s subpoena, the National Archives separately demanded that the Secret Service turn over relevant records and explain what might have happened to any deleted text messages.
Sources familiar with the situation said they were not sure how long it will take for Secret Service lawyers to determine whether to share records with the committee – and whether this would be resolved within a few days or stretch on for weeks.
A source tells CNN the Secret Service is continuing to give records from older requests to the Committee but acknowledged the agency has stopped any new investigative work to find the content of text messages that were lost.
In a statement to CNN, a Secret Service spokesperson said the agency “will continue our unwavering cooperation with the Select Committee and other inquiries.”
Reps. Zoe Lofgren of California and Elaine Luria of Virginia, who serve on the January 6 committee, have both said publicly the Secret Service handed over documents this week. And the committee’s chairman, Democratic Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, said Thursday that the panel received “several hundred thousand” exhibits from the Secret Service two days ago. Thompson said the panel is still reviewing the material and doesn’t know if it contains any new text messages.
When Cuffari met with the committee two weeks ago, Thompson said, he did not tell the committee that the potential deletion of Secret Service text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, was under criminal investigation.
Thompson said he is still waiting to see how the criminal investigation impacts what information the committee can receive, but he does not believe the criminal investigation is affecting the committee’s investigation at this point.
“My understanding of the process is that if you’re involved in a criminal thing, that certain information that you’re not able to share,” Thompson said. “As to where the breaks are with respect to the criminal investigation, I guess we’ll just have to see at some point.”
Neither DHS nor the DHS Inspector General’s Office responded to a request for comment.
Congressional calls for recusal
The potential impasse between the Secret Service and the January 6 committee comes after Thompson called for Cuffari to recuse himself from the probe into the possible deletion of text messages.
RELATED ARTICLE -- Bennie Thompson and Carolyn Maloney. Democratic chairs call for inspector general to recuse himself in Secret Service texts probe
Thompson and House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney sent a letter to Cuffari on Tuesday saying his failure to inform Congress that the Secret Service wasn’t providing records “cast serious doubt on his independence and his ability to effectively conduct such an important investigation.”
Asked Thursday if Cuffari was misleading the committee, Thompson said, “It appears that the IG is potentially at issue with the conduct of his investigation.”
In a sign of the communication breakdown between congressional Democrats and Cuffari, the House Homeland Security Committee, which Thompson also chairs, was never informed by the inspector general that he was conducting a criminal investigation into the Secret Service text messages, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The missing messages exploded into public view this month when the inspector general revealed the issue in a letter to Congress. The letter came after Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the committee about an angry confrontation Trump and his Secret Service detail on January 6.
Timeline takes shape
The issue of the potential missing text messages dates to January 2021, when the Secret Service began its previously planned phone data migration.
On January 16, 2021, before the data migration occurred, the chairs of four House committees sent a letter to DHS and other relevant agencies instructing them to preserve records related to January 6. While Secret Service is part of DHS, it remains unclear whether the agency received the guidance, which did not specifically reference them.
PHOTOGRAPH -- Members of the Secret Service patrol from the roof of the White House as US President Donald Trump speaks to supporters from The Ellipse on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. - Thousands of Trump supporters, fueled by his spurious claims of voter fraud, are flooding the nation's capital protesting the expected certification of Joe Biden's White House victory by the US Congress. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
RELATED STORY -- First on CNN: Secret Service identified potential missing text messages on phones of 10 individuals
A source familiar with the investigation told CNN the Secret Service spent roughly eight hours last week searching for the notice, but never found it.
Nine days after the letter was sent, the Secret Service sent a reminder to employees that a data migration would wipe employees’ phones. The January 25, 2021, notice to employees made clear that employees were responsible for saving records.
The Secret Service began the data migration two days later, on January 27.
A source told CNN the Secret Service realized too late that the data was permanently deleted. The agency attempted to retrieve lost text messages from its cellphone provider, but it was unable to do so, the source said.
In June 2021, Cuffari requested records and texts from the 24 Secret Service employees involved with relevant actions on January 6. CNN has previously reported that the heads of Trump and Pence’s security details are among the 24 individuals.
But then in July 2021, a deputy inspector general told the Department of Homeland Security the office was no longer seeking the text messages from the Secret Service, according to two sources.
Sources told CNN the Secret Service believed the issue had concluded at that point. But the inspector general reopened his inquiry into the text messages in December 2021, one source said.
Skepticism rising
While the Democratic committee chairs have questioned whether Cuffari, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, could lead the Secret Service investigation, House lawmakers on the select committee have also raised suspicions over how the Secret Service might have allowed for messages to be deleted after January 6 – noting that multiple congressional committee had requested agency records before a phone migration led to their possible deletion.
“Count me a skeptic,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat on the panel, on CBS’ “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on Monday. Raskin said that he does not believe “for one minute” that the Secret Service cannot find the texts the agents made on January 6.
PHOTOGRAPH -- U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD)
CNN reported last week that the Secret Service had identified 10 individuals with metadata showing text messages were sent or received around January 6, and the agency was trying to determine whether the content contained relevant information that should have been preserved.
The inspector general’s letter last week notifying the Secret Service of the potential criminal investigation halted those efforts.
The Secret Service suggested in its statement acknowledging the letter that it may not be able to comply with both the inspector general’s directive and the committee’s subpoena. The agency said that it would “conduct a thorough legal review to ensure we are fully cooperative with all oversight efforts and that they do not conflict with each other.”
DOES THIS STATEMENT SOUND AS THOUGH THE SECRET SERVICE CONSIDERS ITSELF TO BE A PRIVATE ARMY FOR THE PRESIDENT OR VICE PRESIDENT?
“'By the nature of what they do, they can’t be the eyes and
ears of Congress or the inspector general or the DOJ, because that would
actually interfere with their mission' to maintain the president’s trust and
privacy, Osgood said."
WERE THE REST OF THE SECRET SERVICE MEMBERS' TEXT MESSAGES
SECURED FOR THOSE DAYS AS THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN? IF SO, CAN INFORMATION BE
DRAWN FROM THOSE FOR CROSS-REFERENCING? ARE THE MISSING RECORDS UNIQUELY
IMPORTANT AS A RECORD OF WHAT HAPPENED IN THAT SITUATION ON THOSE DAYS, OR DOES
THE PATTERN SEEM MORE RANDOM?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/29/jan6-texts-data-security/
TECHNOLOGY
Secret Service’s ‘ludicrous’ deletion of Jan. 6 phone data
baffles experts
Cybersecurity specialists said the agency bungled a routine
task by telling agents to back up their own records, which is ‘not something
any other organization would ever do’
By Drew Harwell, Will Oremus and Joseph Menn
Updated July 29, 2022 at 3:52 p.m. EDT | Published July 29,
2022 at 3:03 p.m. EDT
PHOTOGRAPH -- A lone member of the Secret Service stands on
the White House roof and watches former president Donald Trump leave Washington
on Jan. 20, 2021. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Cybersecurity experts and former government leaders are
stunned by how poorly the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland
Security handled the preservation of officials’ text messages and other data
from around Jan. 6, 2021, saying the top agencies entrusted with fighting
cybercrime should never have bungled the simple task of backing up agents’
phones.
Experts are divided over whether the disappearance of phone
data from around the time of the insurrection is a sign of incompetence, an
intentional coverup, or some murkier middle ground. But the failure has raised
suspicions about the disposition of records that could provide intimate details
about what happened on that chaotic day, and whose preservation was mandated by
federal law.
“This was the most singularly stressful day for the Secret
Service since the attempted assassination of [Ronald] Reagan,” said Paul
Rosenzweig, a senior policy official at the Department of Homeland Security
during the George W. Bush administration who’s now a cybersecurity consultant
in Washington. “Why apparently was there no interest in preserving records for
the purposes of doing an after-action review? It’s like we have a 9/11 attack
and air traffic control wipes its records.”
Rosenzweig said he polled 11 of his friends with
cybersecurity backgrounds, including information-security chiefs at federal
agencies, on whether any of them had ever done a migration without a plan for
backing up data and restoring it. None of them had. “There’s a relatively high
degree of skepticism about [the Secret Service] in the group,” he said.
The Secret Service said it began deleting data from
officials’ phones in the same month as the Capitol siege, when its agents were
among the closest eyewitnesses both to President Donald Trump, now under
criminal investigation for his push to overturn the election, and to Vice
President Mike Pence, who had narrowly escaped the mob.
The agency said the deletions were part of a preplanned
“system migration,” that agents had been instructed to back up their own
phones, and that any “insinuation” of malicious intent is wrong.
But tech experts said such a migration is a task that
smaller organizations routinely accomplish without error. The agency also went
through with its reset of the phones more than a week after Jan. 16, 2021, when
House committees told officials at DHS to hand over all relevant “documents or
materials” as part of their investigations into the deadly assault.
The error likely means that the information, which could
reveal details critical to the Jan. 6 committee’s ongoing investigation, may be
extremely challenging if not impossible to retrieve. Some of the data may
remain on the phones, even after deletion, but with options for unlocking it
that are slim to none.
If the Secret Service had truly wanted to preserve agents’
messages, experts said, it should have been almost trivially easy to do so.
Backups and exports are a basic feature of nearly every messaging service, and
federal law requires such records to be safeguarded and submitted to the
National Archives.
Several experts were critical of the Secret Service’s
explanation that it had asked agents to upload their own phone data to an
agency drive before their phones were wiped. Cybersecurity professionals said
that policy was “highly unusual,” “ludicrous,” a “failure of management” and
“not something any other organization would ever do.”
The error is especially notable because of the Secret
Service’s vaunted role in the federal bureaucracy. Besides protecting America’s
most powerful people, the agency leads some of the government’s most
technically sophisticated investigations of financial fraud, ransomware and
cybercrime.
“Telling people to back up their stuff individually just
sounds crazy,” said one technology chief interviewed by The Post, who spoke on
the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information security practices.
“This is why you have IT people. Why not tell people to go buy their own
ammunition?”
On Thursday, The Washington Post revealed that phone
records from Trump’s acting homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf, and acting
deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli in the days leading up to the Capitol riots
also apparently vanished due to what internal emails suggested was a “reset” of
their phones after they left their jobs in January 2021. Wolf has said he gave
his phone to DHS officials with all data intact, and the reset appears to have
been separate from the Secret Service’s migration.
Some experts said they could see how such errors were
possible. Both the DHS and Secret Service are known for a culture of secrecy, a
disdain for oversight and a preference for operational security above all else.
Among the potential technical complications, these experts said, was the fact
that DHS and Secret Service personnel can use iPhones and Apple’s iMessage for
communications, which encrypts texts and stores them on the phone.
But several experts said they could not understand why the
agencies had not worked more aggressively to safeguard phone records after Jan.
6 — not only because they were legally required to, but because the information
could have helped them scrutinize how they had performed during an attack on
the heart of American democracy.
In a letter to the House select committee investigating the
insurrection, Secret Service officials said they began planning in the fall of
2020 to move all devices onto Microsoft Intune, a “mobile device management”
service, known as an MDM, that companies and other organizations can use to
centrally manage their computers and phones.
The agency said it told its personnel on Jan. 25 to back up
their phones’ data onto an internal drive, notably offering a “step-by-step”
guide, but that employees were ultimately “responsible for appropriately
preserving government records that may be created via text messaging.” The
Secret Service said agents were told that enrolling their devices in the new
system, via a “self-install,” was mandatory, although it was not clear that
actually performing the backup was.
The migration, the agency said, began two days later, on
Jan. 27 — 11 days after the committee had first instructed DHS officials to
preserve their records. Some experts questioned why, even if the process had been
preplanned, the agency did not pause the migration or assume a more direct role
in preserving agents’ data during that 11-day span.
The Secret Service said that the migration process deleted
“data resident on some phones” but that none of the texts that DHS Inspector
General Joseph Cuffari had been seeking were lost.
The agency watchdog had requested all text messages sent
and received by 24 Secret Service personnel between Dec. 7, 2020, and Jan. 8,
2021. The agency returned only one record — a text message conversation from a
former U.S. Capitol Police chief to a former chief of the Secret Service’s
Uniformed Division on Jan. 6, asking for help.
Cuffari’s office said last week it has launched a criminal
investigation into the missing data. But congressional Democrats have since
pushed for Cuffari’s removal, saying the Trump appointee’s failure to promptly
alert Congress has undermined the investigation and diminished the chances that
lost evidence could be recovered. Cuffari’s office, they said, learned in
December that messages had been erased but did not tell Congress until this
month.
Cuffari said earlier this month that “many” texts from Jan.
5 and 6 were erased after he made his first request. Secret Service spokesman
Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement that Cuffari’s office made its request
for the first time in February 2021, after the migration was underway.
Asked for comment Friday, the Secret Service provided a
previously issued statement, saying it was cooperating with the investigation.
Data migrations of these sorts are not uncommon, experts
said. One of the basic rules for conducting them is that devices should be
backed up with redundant copies in such a way that the process can be reversed
if something goes wrong. Microsoft Intune, specifically, offers guides for how
to back up devices, restore saved data and move devices onto the service
without deleting their data outright.
The baffling decision-making and the timing of the
deletions have led some critics to question whether the agencies were seeking
to conceal inconvenient facts. The messages, they pointed out, may have shed a
negative light on the behavior of Trump, a man whom many in DHS and on the
Secret Service had long fought — not just professionally, but personally and
politically — to protect.
One former senior government official who served under
Trump said they viewed the missing texts not as a conspiracy but as the
inevitable result of an organizational failure by DHS to set up systems that
would ensure proper data retention on employees’ devices.
The use of iPhones, which prioritize individual users’
privacy over organizations’ ability to centrally manage data, creates
challenges for data retention that are solvable through the right practices.
But relying on individual Secret Service agents to upload their iMessages,
without any other backup system or way to ensure compliance, before permanently
wiping their devices suggests that such practices were not in place.
“What they’re doing is they’re shifting the burden to the
individual user to do the backup, and that’s a failure of policy and
governance,” the former official said. “It’s the overarching program that was
set up for failure.”
The former official added that it’s unclear how much, if
any, sensitive communication Secret Service agents would have been doing via
iMessage anyway. In many government agencies, employees carry personal devices
as well as their work devices, and rules about keeping work communications on
work devices are not always diligently followed.
The Secret Service blocks its phones from using Apple’s
iCloud, a popular service for automatically saving copies of phone data to the
web, according to an agency official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to
discuss a sensitive matter under investigation.
Using iCloud backups could have ensured that copies of the
messages would have been preserved even after a phone reset. But the system
could have also been seen as a security risk because it made agents’ digital
conversations more vulnerable to hackers or spies.
A former head of technology at another agency within DHS,
speaking on condition of anonymity to describe security practices, told The
Post that not using iCloud “does come with trade-offs” but could also reduce
the need for security officials to “worry about very sensitive data” being
exposed.
Agents could have copied data onto an agency backup drive,
even without iCloud. But the Secret Service, more than other top security
agencies, “tends to want to do their own thing and segment off their IT solutions
as much as possible,” the person said. “They have good reason, and the security
culture itself is fairly good because of the mission.”
Robert Osgood, director of the computer forensics program
at George Mason University and a longtime forensics examiner for the FBI, said
federal law enforcement agencies are typically “really good at storing data”
and that, under normal circumstances, it would take “a comedy of errors” for an
organization such as the Secret Service to delete data critical to a high-profile
investigation.
But “a comedy of errors does happen in the government,
unfortunately, and happens more times than people think,” Osgood said. Secret
Service agents on the president’s security detail, he added, may also face
unique incentives to avoid leaving data trails about sensitive matters.
“By the nature of what they do, they can’t be the eyes and
ears of Congress or the inspector general or the DOJ, because that would
actually interfere with their mission” to maintain the president’s trust and
privacy, Osgood said.
Preserving the records could have also been complicated by
officials’ choices on how they communicated. It’s unclear how many agents used
messaging apps such as Signal or Wickr, which have become popular for their
encryption and security protections, or carried personal phones on Jan. 6. One
former government official said such behavior is common in DHS, especially
within small or select groups such as the presidential and vice-presidential
details.
As part of DHS, the Secret Service would have been required
to use some form of “mobile device management” (MDM) service even before the
Intune migration, a former FBI cybersecurity agent told The Post.
But the agency has not specified what MDM it migrated from,
and each system works in different ways. Some allow for complete access to
phone contents by IT administrators, while others permit only a couple of
actions, such as deleting or “wiping” data from a device after it has been
discontinued. Some MDMs, including Intune, also allow organizations to restrict
what apps employees can download to their devices, potentially limiting their
options for messaging to officially approved apps.
If the agency had pursued a typical migration process,
experts said it would be strange for the agency to have lost data for only some
agents, or for more than a day. A veteran data forensics expert at a large
consulting firm who was not authorized to speak publicly said it “does sound
fishy” that so much data would go missing.
Leaving backups of critical data to individual employees
would be an odd choice for an organization’s IT department if the top priority
were to make sure nothing was lost, said Paul Bischoff, an online privacy
expert at the security firm Comparitech.
“If individual staff members were responsible for backing
up and resetting their own devices instead of trained IT staff, I can see a lot
of opportunities for user error to crop up,” Bischoff said. “That might result
in some data being accidentally lost, or it could just be a convenient alibi.”
It also remains unclear whether the data is gone forever.
It is sometimes possible to retrieve data deleted in a factory reset of a
phone, depending on how the data was stored, Bischoff said. “Until the old data
is actually overwritten with new data, it can remain on disk even after a
factory reset and in many cases be recovered using forensic software.” That may
not be possible, however, if it was encrypted or overwritten before the reset.
Osgood said he takes the Secret Service at its word that it
didn’t intentionally destroy what it should have known could be critical
evidence in a historic investigation. But he said its explanations to date
leave “more questions than answers.”
Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.
By Drew Harwell
Drew Harwell is a reporter for The Washington Post covering
artificial intelligence and the algorithms changing our lives. He was a member
of an international reporting team that won a George Polk Award in 2021. Twitter
By Will Oremus
Will Oremus writes about the ideas, products, and power
struggles shaping the digital world for The Washington Post. Before joining The
Post in 2021, he spent eight years as Slate's senior technology writer and two
years as a senior writer for OneZero at Medium.
Twitter
By Joseph Menn
Joseph Menn joined The Post in 2022 after two decades
covering technology for Reuters, the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Times.
His books include "Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking
Supergroup Might Just Save the World" (2019) and "Fatal System Error:
The Hunt for the New Crime Lords who are Bringing Down the Internet"
(2010). Twitter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9P0nbzD4Ag
1:04:16 HRS.
Carol Leonnig: The Rise and Fall of
the Secret Service
Fundraiser, 1:04:16 HRS.
65,163 views May 27, 2021 1.1K
Commonwealth Club of California
145K subscribers
One of the final things Abraham Lincoln
did on the day of his death was approve legislation that created what would
become the Secret Service. Originally created to suppress counterfeit currency,
the Secret Service has since become the primary agency to protect prominent
politicians and their families. Following the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy in 1963, the Secret Service was whipped into shape. The agency
transformed into a proud, elite unit that would redeem themselves again two
decades later by successfully thwarting an assassination attempt against
President Ronald Reagan.
Now, in the 21st century, the Secret
Service is better defined by its failure to avert break-ins at the White House,
armed gunmen firing at government buildings, a massive prostitution scandal in
Cartagena, and many other instances of negligence. Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist Carol Leonnig has been covering the Secret Service since 2000, and
her new book, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, exposes the
triumphs and failures of the Secret Service, documenting a broken agency in
desperate need of reform. Through interviews with whistleblowers, current
agents and former agents, Leonnig reveals what she says is the Secret Service’s
toxic work culture, outdated training techniques and deep resentment among the
ranks with the agency's leadership.
Join us as Carol Leonnig unmasks the
rise and fall of the Secret Service, and puts out a much-needed call for the
agency’s improvement and action.
SPEAKERS
Carol Leonnig
Investigative Reporter, The Washington
Post; Author, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service
In Conversation with Marisa Lagos
Correspondent for California
Politics and Government, KQED; Twitter @mlagos
**** **** **** ****
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/29/jan6-texts-data-security/
TECHNOLOGY
Secret Service’s ‘ludicrous’ deletion of Jan. 6 phone data
baffles experts
Cybersecurity specialists said the agency bungled a routine
task by telling agents to back up their own records, which is ‘not something
any other organization would ever do’
By Drew Harwell, Will Oremus and Joseph Menn
Updated July 29, 2022 at 3:52 p.m. EDT | Published July 29,
2022 at 3:03 p.m. EDT
PHOTOGRAPH -- A lone member of the Secret Service stands on
the White House roof and watches former president Donald Trump leave Washington
on Jan. 20, 2021. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Cybersecurity experts and former government leaders are
stunned by how poorly the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland
Security handled the preservation of officials’ text messages and other data
from around Jan. 6, 2021, saying the top agencies entrusted with fighting
cybercrime should never have bungled the simple task of backing up agents’
phones.
Experts are divided over whether the disappearance of phone
data from around the time of the insurrection is a sign of incompetence, an
intentional coverup, or some murkier middle ground. But the failure has raised
suspicions about the disposition of records that could provide intimate details
about what happened on that chaotic day, and whose preservation was mandated by
federal law.
“This was the most singularly stressful day for the Secret
Service since the attempted assassination of [Ronald] Reagan,” said Paul
Rosenzweig, a senior policy official at the Department of Homeland Security
during the George W. Bush administration who’s now a cybersecurity consultant
in Washington. “Why apparently was there no interest in preserving records for
the purposes of doing an after-action review? It’s like we have a 9/11 attack
and air traffic control wipes its records.”
Rosenzweig said he polled 11 of his friends with
cybersecurity backgrounds, including information-security chiefs at federal
agencies, on whether any of them had ever done a migration without a plan for
backing up data and restoring it. None of them had. “There’s a relatively high
degree of skepticism about [the Secret Service] in the group,” he said.
The Secret Service said it began deleting data from
officials’ phones in the same month as the Capitol siege, when its agents were
among the closest eyewitnesses both to President Donald Trump, now under
criminal investigation for his push to overturn the election, and to Vice
President Mike Pence, who had narrowly escaped the mob.
The agency said the deletions were part of a preplanned
“system migration,” that agents had been instructed to back up their own
phones, and that any “insinuation” of malicious intent is wrong.
But tech experts said such a migration is a task that
smaller organizations routinely accomplish without error. The agency also went
through with its reset of the phones more than a week after Jan. 16, 2021, when
House committees told officials at DHS to hand over all relevant “documents or
materials” as part of their investigations into the deadly assault.
The error likely means that the information, which could
reveal details critical to the Jan. 6 committee’s ongoing investigation, may be
extremely challenging if not impossible to retrieve. Some of the data may
remain on the phones, even after deletion, but with options for unlocking it
that are slim to none.
If the Secret Service had truly wanted to preserve agents’
messages, experts said, it should have been almost trivially easy to do so.
Backups and exports are a basic feature of nearly every messaging service, and
federal law requires such records to be safeguarded and submitted to the
National Archives.
Several experts were critical of the Secret Service’s
explanation that it had asked agents to upload their own phone data to an
agency drive before their phones were wiped. Cybersecurity professionals said
that policy was “highly unusual,” “ludicrous,” a “failure of management” and
“not something any other organization would ever do.”
The error is especially notable because of the Secret
Service’s vaunted role in the federal bureaucracy. Besides protecting America’s
most powerful people, the agency leads some of the government’s most
technically sophisticated investigations of financial fraud, ransomware and
cybercrime.
“Telling people to back up their stuff individually just
sounds crazy,” said one technology chief interviewed by The Post, who spoke on
the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information security practices.
“This is why you have IT people. Why not tell people to go buy their own
ammunition?”
On Thursday, The Washington Post revealed that phone
records from Trump’s acting homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf, and acting
deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli in the days leading up to the Capitol riots
also apparently vanished due to what internal emails suggested was a “reset” of
their phones after they left their jobs in January 2021. Wolf has said he gave
his phone to DHS officials with all data intact, and the reset appears to have
been separate from the Secret Service’s migration.
Some experts said they could see how such errors were
possible. Both the DHS and Secret Service are known for a culture of secrecy, a
disdain for oversight and a preference for operational security above all else.
Among the potential technical complications, these experts said, was the fact
that DHS and Secret Service personnel can use iPhones and Apple’s iMessage for
communications, which encrypts texts and stores them on the phone.
But several experts said they could not understand why the
agencies had not worked more aggressively to safeguard phone records after Jan.
6 — not only because they were legally required to, but because the information
could have helped them scrutinize how they had performed during an attack on
the heart of American democracy.
In a letter to the House select committee investigating the
insurrection, Secret Service officials said they began planning in the fall of
2020 to move all devices onto Microsoft Intune, a “mobile device management”
service, known as an MDM, that companies and other organizations can use to
centrally manage their computers and phones.
The agency said it told its personnel on Jan. 25 to back up
their phones’ data onto an internal drive, notably offering a “step-by-step”
guide, but that employees were ultimately “responsible for appropriately
preserving government records that may be created via text messaging.” The
Secret Service said agents were told that enrolling their devices in the new
system, via a “self-install,” was mandatory, although it was not clear that
actually performing the backup was.
The migration, the agency said, began two days later, on
Jan. 27 — 11 days after the committee had first instructed DHS officials to
preserve their records. Some experts questioned why, even if the process had been
preplanned, the agency did not pause the migration or assume a more direct role
in preserving agents’ data during that 11-day span.
The Secret Service said that the migration process deleted
“data resident on some phones” but that none of the texts that DHS Inspector
General Joseph Cuffari had been seeking were lost.
The agency watchdog had requested all text messages sent
and received by 24 Secret Service personnel between Dec. 7, 2020, and Jan. 8,
2021. The agency returned only one record — a text message conversation from a
former U.S. Capitol Police chief to a former chief of the Secret Service’s
Uniformed Division on Jan. 6, asking for help.
Cuffari’s office said last week it has launched a criminal
investigation into the missing data. But congressional Democrats have since
pushed for Cuffari’s removal, saying the Trump appointee’s failure to promptly
alert Congress has undermined the investigation and diminished the chances that
lost evidence could be recovered. Cuffari’s office, they said, learned in
December that messages had been erased but did not tell Congress until this
month.
Cuffari said earlier this month that “many” texts from Jan.
5 and 6 were erased after he made his first request. Secret Service spokesman
Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement that Cuffari’s office made its request
for the first time in February 2021, after the migration was underway.
Asked for comment Friday, the Secret Service provided a
previously issued statement, saying it was cooperating with the investigation.
Data migrations of these sorts are not uncommon, experts
said. One of the basic rules for conducting them is that devices should be
backed up with redundant copies in such a way that the process can be reversed
if something goes wrong. Microsoft Intune, specifically, offers guides for how
to back up devices, restore saved data and move devices onto the service
without deleting their data outright.
The baffling decision-making and the timing of the
deletions have led some critics to question whether the agencies were seeking
to conceal inconvenient facts. The messages, they pointed out, may have shed a
negative light on the behavior of Trump, a man whom many in DHS and on the
Secret Service had long fought — not just professionally, but personally and
politically — to protect.
One former senior government official who served under
Trump said they viewed the missing texts not as a conspiracy but as the
inevitable result of an organizational failure by DHS to set up systems that
would ensure proper data retention on employees’ devices.
The use of iPhones, which prioritize individual users’
privacy over organizations’ ability to centrally manage data, creates
challenges for data retention that are solvable through the right practices.
But relying on individual Secret Service agents to upload their iMessages,
without any other backup system or way to ensure compliance, before permanently
wiping their devices suggests that such practices were not in place.
“What they’re doing is they’re shifting the burden to the
individual user to do the backup, and that’s a failure of policy and
governance,” the former official said. “It’s the overarching program that was
set up for failure.”
The former official added that it’s unclear how much, if
any, sensitive communication Secret Service agents would have been doing via
iMessage anyway. In many government agencies, employees carry personal devices
as well as their work devices, and rules about keeping work communications on
work devices are not always diligently followed.
The Secret Service blocks its phones from using Apple’s
iCloud, a popular service for automatically saving copies of phone data to the
web, according to an agency official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to
discuss a sensitive matter under investigation.
Using iCloud backups could have ensured that copies of the
messages would have been preserved even after a phone reset. But the system
could have also been seen as a security risk because it made agents’ digital
conversations more vulnerable to hackers or spies.
A former head of technology at another agency within DHS,
speaking on condition of anonymity to describe security practices, told The
Post that not using iCloud “does come with trade-offs” but could also reduce
the need for security officials to “worry about very sensitive data” being
exposed.
Agents could have copied data onto an agency backup drive,
even without iCloud. But the Secret Service, more than other top security
agencies, “tends to want to do their own thing and segment off their IT solutions
as much as possible,” the person said. “They have good reason, and the security
culture itself is fairly good because of the mission.”
Robert Osgood, director of the computer forensics program
at George Mason University and a longtime forensics examiner for the FBI, said
federal law enforcement agencies are typically “really good at storing data”
and that, under normal circumstances, it would take “a comedy of errors” for an
organization such as the Secret Service to delete data critical to a high-profile
investigation.
But “a comedy of errors does happen in the government,
unfortunately, and happens more times than people think,” Osgood said. Secret
Service agents on the president’s security detail, he added, may also face
unique incentives to avoid leaving data trails about sensitive matters.
“By the nature of what they do, they can’t be the eyes and
ears of Congress or the inspector general or the DOJ, because that would
actually interfere with their mission” to maintain the president’s trust and
privacy, Osgood said.
Preserving the records could have also been complicated by
officials’ choices on how they communicated. It’s unclear how many agents used
messaging apps such as Signal or Wickr, which have become popular for their
encryption and security protections, or carried personal phones on Jan. 6. One
former government official said such behavior is common in DHS, especially
within small or select groups such as the presidential and vice-presidential
details.
As part of DHS, the Secret Service would have been required
to use some form of “mobile device management” (MDM) service even before the
Intune migration, a former FBI cybersecurity agent told The Post.
But the agency has not specified what MDM it migrated from,
and each system works in different ways. Some allow for complete access to
phone contents by IT administrators, while others permit only a couple of
actions, such as deleting or “wiping” data from a device after it has been
discontinued. Some MDMs, including Intune, also allow organizations to restrict
what apps employees can download to their devices, potentially limiting their
options for messaging to officially approved apps.
If the agency had pursued a typical migration process,
experts said it would be strange for the agency to have lost data for only some
agents, or for more than a day. A veteran data forensics expert at a large
consulting firm who was not authorized to speak publicly said it “does sound
fishy” that so much data would go missing.
Leaving backups of critical data to individual employees
would be an odd choice for an organization’s IT department if the top priority
were to make sure nothing was lost, said Paul Bischoff, an online privacy
expert at the security firm Comparitech.
“If individual staff members were responsible for backing
up and resetting their own devices instead of trained IT staff, I can see a lot
of opportunities for user error to crop up,” Bischoff said. “That might result
in some data being accidentally lost, or it could just be a convenient alibi.”
It also remains unclear whether the data is gone forever.
It is sometimes possible to retrieve data deleted in a factory reset of a
phone, depending on how the data was stored, Bischoff said. “Until the old data
is actually overwritten with new data, it can remain on disk even after a
factory reset and in many cases be recovered using forensic software.” That may
not be possible, however, if it was encrypted or overwritten before the reset.
Osgood said he takes the Secret Service at its word that it
didn’t intentionally destroy what it should have known could be critical
evidence in a historic investigation. But he said its explanations to date
leave “more questions than answers.”
Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.
By Drew Harwell
Drew Harwell is a reporter for The Washington Post covering
artificial intelligence and the algorithms changing our lives. He was a member
of an international reporting team that won a George Polk Award in 2021. Twitter
By Will Oremus
Will Oremus writes about the ideas, products, and power
struggles shaping the digital world for The Washington Post. Before joining The
Post in 2021, he spent eight years as Slate's senior technology writer and two
years as a senior writer for OneZero at Medium.
Twitter
By Joseph Menn
Joseph Menn joined The Post in 2022 after two decades covering technology for Reuters, the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Times. His books include "Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World" (2019) and "Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords who are Bringing Down the Internet" (2010). Twitter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9P0nbzD4Ag
1:04:16 HRS.
Carol Leonnig: The Rise and Fall of
the Secret Service
Fundraiser, 1:04:16 HRS.
65,163 views May 27, 2021 1.1K
1:04:16 HRS.
Carol Leonnig: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service
Fundraiser, 1:04:16 HRS.
65,163 views May 27, 2021 1.1K
