Search This Blog

Friday, July 29, 2022

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
 
MORE FROM THE POST
*Biden issues disaster declaration as Kentucky flooding kills at least 16, Today at 4:31 p.m. EDT
*Let’s say Biden isn’t the nominee. Here’s who runs — and wins. Today at 7:00 a.m. EDT
*Rising GOP anger at Mitch McConnell offers a lesson for Democrats, Today at 1:22 p.m. EDT
*What the fall of WWE’s Vince McMahon reveals about post-Trump politics, July 28, 2022


 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
 

****    ****    ****    ****    

 
 
 
 
 

No comments:

Post a Comment