A few thoughts about January 6, 2021

The Rogue Wolf

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Well, shit, there it is.


Up by a run in the second inning, declare yourself the winner. It fits the pattern; that's what he told Oz to do.

 

XsjadoBlayde

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Late on a Friday night about six weeks after Donald Trump lost his reelection, a fistfight nearly broke out in the White House between the president’s fired national security adviser and a top White House aide.

A motley crew of unofficial Trump advisers had talked their way into the Oval Office and an audience with the president of the United States to argue the election had been stolen by shadowy foreign powers — perhaps remotely via Nest thermostats.

For hours, the group tried to persuade Trump to take extraordinary, potentially illegal action to ignore the election results and try to stay in power. And for hours, some of Trump’s actual White House advisers tried to persuade him that those ideas were, in the words of one lawyer who participated, “nuts.”

There was shouting, insults and profanity, former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann testified to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Herschmann said he nearly came to blows with Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser who was part of the Trump’s group of impromptu visitors.

“Flynn screamed at me that I was a quitter and everything. … At a certain point I had it with him,” Herschmann recalled in taped testimony that played at a Tuesday hearing. “So, I yelled back: Either come over, or sit your effing ass back down.”

Even for a White House known for its unconventional chaos, the Dec. 18, 2020, meeting was an extraordinary moment, demonstrating how Trump invited fringe players advocating radical action into his inner sanctum, as he searched for a way to remain in office despite losing an election.

“The west wing is UNHINGED,” declared Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in a text message sent as the meeting unfolded.

The rolling, hours-long shouting match was absurd, said Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a committee member. But nevertheless, the night was “critical,” he argued, since it provided a forum for Trump to watch as his own advisers shot down, one by one, the false theories to which he had been clinging in hopes of staying in office.

“President Trump got to watch up close for several hours as his White House counsel and other White House lawyers destroyed the baseless factual claims and ridiculous legal arguments being offered by … Mike Flynn and others,” Raskin said.

Still, Trump was not dissuaded.

The wild session — during which Trump weighed seizing voting machines from key counties, deploying the National Guard to potentially rerun the election or appointing lawyer Sidney Powell as a special counsel to investigate the election — had been widely reported in past accounts of Trump’s final weeks in office.

But the committee, at its seventh public hearing on Tuesday, brought forward powerful and vivid personal testimony from six different participants — both those who wanted the president to act and those begging him not to do so — weaving them together in a video montage that intercut voices from both sides.

It took place four days after the electoral college met and, confirming the popular vote in key states, formally elected Joe Biden the next president. The committee showed clips of testimony demonstrating that Trump was told by everyone from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to Attorney General William P. Barr to Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia — a lawyer and son of a deceased conservative Supreme Court justice — that there was no longer a legal path for him to remain in office, and it was time to concede.

Yet somehow, the delegation that included Flynn and Powell prevailed on a junior staffer to escort them into one of the country’s most secure facilities, where the group met for a time with Trump alone before any White House staffer even realized they were in the building.

Testifying to the committee via remote video, wearing oversized glasses and an animal print top, and sipping periodically from a can of Diet Dr Pepper, Powell — who had filed several unsuccessful lawsuits challenging the election — wryly explained that Trump’s aides came running when they realized what was happening.

“I bet Pat Cipollone set a new land-speed record,” she said, referring to the White House counsel.

For his part, Cipollone testified that he got a call that he needed to be in the Oval Office and rushed into the room. There, he spotted Flynn and Powell and another man he did not recognize.

“I walked in, I looked at him and I said, ‘Who are you?’” said Cipollone, in one of a number of clips played by the committee of testimony given by Cipollone last week, after months of negotiations.

The man was Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive of the discount furniture outlet Overstock.com, who was helping to organize and fund Powell and Flynn’s efforts. Cipollone told the committee he was chagrined. “I don’t think any of these people were providing the president with good advice. And so I didn’t understand how they had gotten in,” he testified.

Cipollone was joined by other White House aides including Herschmann and staff secretary Derek Lyons, and the group listened as Flynn, Powell, Byrne and another lawyer working with Powell named Emily Newman assured Trump the election had been stolen. Meadows arrived eventually. Trump at times called other campaign aides and placed them on speaker phone.

“At one point, General Flynn took out a diagram that supposedly showed IP addresses all over the world, and who was communicating with whom via the machines and some comment about, like, Nest thermostats being hooked up to the internet,” Herschmann recalled.

The group recommended that Trump sign an executive order — they had brought a draft — that would appoint Powell as special counsel and instruct the Defense Department to seize voting machines, testimony showed.

But, according to Cipollone, the group was unable to answer one key question from Trump’s White House advisers.

“We were pushing back and asking one simple question as a general matter: Where is the evidence?” he recounted.

According to Cipollone, Powell and the others reacted with anger, suggesting that even asking the question was a sign that Trump’s White House team was insufficiently loyal to him. The committee emphasized the point by then showing a clip of Powell.

“If it had been me sitting in his chair, I would have fired all of them that night and had them escorted out of the building,” she testified.

All parties agreed the meeting was heated.

Three people familiar with the hours-long session told The Washington Post that the committee’s presentation captured the broad outlines of the meeting. They each spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe the private meeting.

“The only thing that they didn’t quite capture was how loud and how profane it was. It was literally people just screaming and swearing and yelling at each other for hours,” one person said.

“Sidney Powell was screaming at the president that we were trying to undermine him the whole time,” said another person, who added that much of the meeting revolved around discussion of voting machines and Powell’s promise that if she could seize the machines, she could prove her theories.

A third person told The Post that Cipollone had his jacket on to leave for dinner with his family when he got the call about the meeting. “He thought he was going to be there for a few minutes, and he was there for many hours,” the person said.

It was Lyons’s last day as a White House official, and he planned to go to dinner with friends but was unexpectedly delayed in the Oval Office. Shouting could be heard from down the hall, the person said.

Herschmann testified that the screaming got “completely, completely out there.”

“It’d been a long day. And what they were proposing, I thought was nuts,” he testified.

The committee then immediately played a video of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who had made his way to the White House that night and joined the meeting already in progress. Seated jacketless in a leather armchair and speaking in gravelly tones, Giuliani explained to the committee what he told Trump’s closest advisers that day: “I’m going to categorically describe it as, ‘You guys are not tough enough.’ Or maybe I put it another way, ‘You’re a bunch of pussies.’”

At some point, the meeting migrated to the Yellow Oval Room in the White House residence, where Trump served the group Swedish meatballs. (Byrne was “nonstop housing meatballs — he ate so many meatballs,” one person familiar with the gathering told The Post.) There the fighting continued.

By the end, after midnight, Powell testified that she believed that Trump had agreed to name her special counsel and extend her top secret clearance. Cipollone declined to explain to the committee what Trump said in the meeting but insisted no paperwork was ever filed to complete the appointment. Regardless, Lyons said Trump came away convinced the outsiders were working to keep him in office, as he desired. The meeting ended as it had started, Lyons testified: “Sidney Powell was fighting, Mike Flynn was fighting. They were looking for avenues that would enable it would result in President Trump remaining President Trump for a second term.”

At 12:11 a.m., with apparent relief, Hutchinson texted Anthony Ornato, then deputy chief of staff, that Powell, Flynn and Giuliani had left the building. She expressed amazement that Byrne — the former Overstock CEO — had been with the group. “Dream team!!!!” she wrote.

She then sent someone a photograph she had just taken of her boss, Trump’s chief of staff, escorting Giuliani from the building “to make sure he didn’t wander back to the Mansion.”

The White House aides might have been relieved to bring the meeting to a close. But at 1:42 a.m., Trump made clear which side in the debate had won his heart.

“Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” he tweeted. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild.”
Armando Iannucci might as well have written this shit himself.




As the U.S. House Select Committee showed the nation that the Trump administration worked closely with extremist groups like the Oathkeepers to overturn the 2020 election, Mesa County, Colorado, Clerk Tina Peters yesterday told a conference of extremist sheriffs that Conan Hayes, the man whom she permitted to copy her county’s election server files, had dinner with her and Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO) the next day.

“I’m going to tell you one more little tidbit and then I’m going to get off the stage because this is going to bring a lot of house down,” said Peters at an all-day press conference in Las Vegas hosted by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) yesterday. “But I believe that if you tell the truth, you never have to worry about what you said.

“The day that the man that came in to do the image on the Mesa County computer, I promised him I would protect his identity because he had just brought down one of the biggest human trafficking rings in the United States, maybe the world. So a liar and a cheat came up and said he would use his identity. And now he’s out there saying, he didn’t even know who I was, but he was flying back on Mike Lindell’s plane after the symposium and all these other things.

“And you know what? You know who else met him? So he did the image on a Sunday. And it was not in the middle of the night. It was in the afternoon after his flight got in. Monday night, he was with me, [former Boebert Campaign Manager] Sherronna [Bishop], one of our candidates for commissioner, and Lauren Boebert! No — don’t clap for her. Do not clap for her!”

For those not familiar with the Clerk Peters election saga, her statement may be confusing, so here’s a brief explanation.


Twitter account @get_innocuous did much of the early reporting on Hayes’ role in “election audits”

Peters says she promised not to disclose the identity of the man who “did the image,” because of alleged risks to his safety. While various facts reported over the past year have pointed to former surf wear CEO Conan Hayes, who was working for wealthy tech conspiracist Patrick Byrne at the time, as the person who copied the voter files, it wasn’t until a New York Times report on June 26 that Hayes’ identity was confirmed.

In the middle of her story about Hayes and Boebert, Peters briefly mentions another man, the one she refers to as “a liar and a cheat.” That’s Gerald Wood, a local resident whom she vetted to be an IT contractor apparently only to create an office ID badge for Hayes to use.

Peters then returns to talking about Hayes, saying he conducted the imaging of the computer drive on Sunday before dining with her and Boebert on Monday. That timeline matches reporting that the files were copied on Sunday, May 23, 2021.

Reached for comment, Peters declined to elaborate on the substance of the evening’s conversation, but confirmed that Boebert and Hayes met at the dinner which took place in Grand Junction and said there were witnesses.

“Just know this,” said Peters. I got a hug from the Congresswoman and she told me “thank you for what you’re doing. Let me know how it goes.”

Neither Boebert nor Bishop responded to requests for comment. This article will be updated with any responses received. Attempts to reach Hayes for comment were unsuccessful.

Peters also announced that another of her former employees had been arrested on charges related to the election security breach, breaking news since reported by the Grand Junction Sentinel. That story also cites an affidavit from a county investigator naming Hayes as the man who made the disk image, further confirming his identity.

Peters used her former employee’s arrest as the opening hook of her speech at an election fraud press conference in Las Vegas yesterday.

“I’m mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore,” said Peters at the CSPOA press conference. “You know what today is? Today is my election manager’s birthday. Do you know where she is? She’s in jail. Our crooked D.A. arrested her yesterday, knowing today is her birthday. She’s in the Mesa County jail right now for impersonation.”

The CSPOA is an anti-government extremist group that uses debunked “sovereign citizen” arguments to claim that local sheriffs have complete authority over their jurisdiction including the power to ignore state and federal laws. CSPOA founder Richard Mack, a former director of the Oathkeepers militia which was involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection, is calling on sheriffs to use their powers to investigate the debunked election fraud claims made by the conspiracy movie 2,000 Mules.
 
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XsjadoBlayde

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Oki, sorry for overposting, promise last one, just a tad concerning.






THE SECRET SERVICE erased text messages from January 5 and January 6, 2021, according to a letter given to the January 6 committee and reviewed by The Intercept. The letter was originally sent by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general to the House and Senate homeland security committees. Though the Secret Service maintains that the text messages were lost as a result of a “device-replacement program,” the letter says the erasure took place shortly after oversight officials requested the agency’s electronic communications.



The Secret Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.



The Secret Service has emerged as a key player in the explosive congressional hearings on former President Donald Trump’s role in the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an attempt to prevent the 2020 election results from being certified. That day, then-Vice President Mike Pence was at the Capitol to certify the results. When rioters entered the Capitol, the Secret Service tried to whisk Pence away from the scene.



“I’m not getting in the car,” Pence reportedly told the Secret Service detail on January 6. “If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off.” Had Pence entered the vice presidential limo, he would have been taken to a secure location where he would have been unable to certify the presidential election results, plunging the U.S. into uncharted waters.



“People need to understand that if Pence had listened to the Secret Service and fled the Capitol, this could have turned out a whole lot worse,” a congressional official not authorized to speak publicly told The Intercept. “ It could’ve been a successful coup, not just an attempted one.”



Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the January 6 committee, called Pence’s terse refusal — ‘I’m not getting in that car’ — “the six most chilling words of this entire thing I’ve seen so far.”



But, the OIG letter suggests, key evidence in the form of the Secret Service’s electronic communications may never see the light of day. The Department of Homeland Security — Secret Service’s parent agency — is subject to oversight of the DHS Office of Inspector General, which had requested records of electronic communications from the Secret Service between January 5 and 6 of 2021, before being informed that they had been erased. It is unclear from the letter whether all of the messages were deleted, or just some. DHS officials have also pushed back on the OIG’s records request by arguing that the records must first undergo review by DHS attorneys, which has delayed the process and left unclear if the Secret Service records would ever be produced, according to the letter.



Asked about the matter, a DHS-OIG spokesperson told The Intercept, “To preserve the integrity of our work and protect our independence, we do not discuss our ongoing reviews or our communications with Congress.”



A top Secret Service official allegedly involved in the attempt to spirit away Pence on January 6 remains in a leadership position at the agency. Tony Ornato, a Secret Service agent whom Trump made the unprecedented decision to appoint as his deputy White House Chief of Staff, reportedly informed Pence’s national security advisor, Keith Kellogg, on January 6 that agents would relocate the Vice President to Joint Base Andrews. “You can’t do that, Tony,” Kellogg reportedly told Ornato. “Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.” (Ornato has denied the account.)



Today, Ornato serves as Assistant Director at the Secret Service’s Office of Training.



Agencies, especially those involved in national security, often use the sensitivity of their work to sidestep oversight, stymying the work of the OIG. It is not uncommon for Inspectors General, particularly effective ones, to face institutional resistance during the course of investigations. Tasked with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse, inspectors general’s oversight responsibilities are not always welcomed.



A Customs and Border Protection official provided The Intercept with a document illustrating the challenges. A briefing memo produced by CBP for a leadership meeting with DHS-OIG on July 7 instructs participants in how to push back against what it calls the Inspector General’s “persistent” request for “direct, unfettered access to CBP systems,” as part of its “high number of OIG audits covering a variety of CBP program areas.” In a section titled, “Watch Out For/ If Asked,” the memo describes a number of exemptions CBP can rely on to evade OIG records requests — including national security exemptions.
 
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SilentPony

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I've been saying it for over a year, this nation will be shaken to its core when it comes out the amount of people involved in this. This wasn't just a half dozen Congressmen working with the Proud Boys hoping to slip a fast one past Pence. This was close to a military operation. Members of Congress, White House staff, capital police, secret service, Pentagon officials, top ranking military officials, members of the Justice department, more than one Supreme Court member, Congressional staff, and any number of right-wing terrorist groups.
I doubt anything will ever come of these hearings, but in a few decades if we're still a nation it'll come out how extensive this operation was, conveniently after all the planners are dead and there is no point in prosecuting.
 

Agema

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This was close to a military operation.
Sure... as long as the military staff planning it were a bunch of incompetent dilettantes.

In that sense, I might view it more as a sort of pre-Napoleonic military operation: a bunch of amateur, chinless inbreds cooking up plans and prating about things to do based on little more than noble entitlement where, with a bit of luck, someone high up like an Alexander, Duke of Marlborough or Charlemagne actually had some talent.
 
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SilentPony

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Sure... as long as the military staff planning it were a bunch of incompetent dilettantes.

In that sense, I might view it more as a sort of pre-Napoleonic military operation: a bunch of amateur, chinless inbreds cooking up plans and prating about things to do based on little more than noble entitlement where, with a bit of luck, someone high up like an Alexander, Duke of Marlborough or Charlemagne actually had some talent.
I mean if you're getting the Secret Service to impeded an official investigation, its more than just a few amateurs and inbreds. That's pretty high level corruption. That's "open an investigation into every member of the SS and completely start the agency again because we can't trust any of them not to kill Biden given the chance" levels of corruption.
 

Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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I mean if you're getting the Secret Service to impeded an official investigation, its more than just a few amateurs and inbreds. That's pretty high level corruption. That's "open an investigation into every member of the SS and completely start the agency again because we can't trust any of them not to kill Biden given the chance" levels of corruption.
Yes, but the SS (ho ho) in this case are essentially the troops: they're not the guys planning the operation, they're the rank and file and NCOs.
 

SilentPony

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Yes, but the SS (ho ho) in this case are essentially the troops: they're not the guys planning the operation, they're the rank and file and NCOs.
Right, exactly. The Secret Service wouldn't act without high up support. Random troops just don't run operations, you have planning and logistics for weeks if not months. Part of being certified President is beginning the process of transferring the Nuke Football over. So someone somewhere along that logistics line would have been okay with illegally halting that process. Orders would need to be ignored/not issued.
It really wasn't just some neckbeards angry about liberals. It was high up, severe, terminal levels of corruption and treason in Government.
 

bluegate

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I doubt anything will ever come of these hearings, but in a few decades if we're still a nation it'll come out how extensive this operation was, conveniently after all the planners are dead and there is no point in prosecuting.
Look at the bright side, by that time America might have slipped all the way down to North Korea levels of purging three generations within a family.
 
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Buyetyen

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Well, shit, there it is.


Will somebody please just exorcise Steve Bannon already?

Sure... as long as the military staff planning it were a bunch of incompetent dilettantes.

In that sense, I might view it more as a sort of pre-Napoleonic military operation: a bunch of amateur, chinless inbreds cooking up plans and prating about things to do based on little more than noble entitlement where, with a bit of luck, someone high up like an Alexander, Duke of Marlborough or Charlemagne actually had some talent.
Underestimate them at your own peril. They can and probably will get away with it, meaning they will keep trying until it works.
 
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Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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Underestimate them at your own peril. They can and probably will get away with it, meaning they will keep trying until it works.
I don't underestimate the Trump team at all. They were, and remain, a bunch of swivel-eyed incompetents.

What Trump et al. have is the protection of a political party within an institutional system that requires that party's consent to take any meaningful action against them. He may eventually face action through the conventional legal system, and we'll just have to see how that goes.
 
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SilentPony

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I don't underestimate the Trump team at all. They were, and remain, a bunch of swivel-eyed incompetents.

What Trump et al. have is the protection of a political party within an institutional system that requires that party's consent to take any meaningful action against them. He may eventually face action through the conventional legal system, and we'll just have to see how that goes.
Trump and his team were always useful idiots. Christians didn't care he was a sinner and looked at the ten commandments like a challenge - he got them 3 supreme court seats, and look how that turned out. The US is literally on the brink of tumbling towards a Christian theocracy.
Rightwing extremists don't care he was a Democrat only a few years ago - he normalized extreme anti-Government actions and violence. He said on the campaign trail back in 2016 to beat the living hell out of a journalist, and that journalist was assaulted. The response? A bunch of extremists saying how cool it was.
Fox News doesn't care he lies the same was the rest of us breathe - he brings in millions of hate watchers who want to know how to own the liberals.

Even if Trump and team get punished for Jan 6th, which they won't, Republicans have learned a valuable lesson. If you want to steal an election, you need to have people in place at the state/county level who actually count the votes in order to falsify the results and get the "correct" person elected:

The Nation is in serious trouble because one party looks at Democracy as optional now, and the other party is a beaten spouse crying in the corner trying to tell itself this is the last time.
 

XsjadoBlaydette

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"Soz, all gone, just gone, oopsie!"

The U.S. Secret Service has determined it has no new texts to provide Congress relevant to its Jan. 6 investigation, and that any other texts its agents exchanged around the time of the 2021 attack on the Capitol were purged, according to a senior official briefed on the matter.

Also, the National Archives on Tuesday sought more information on “the potential unauthorized deletion” of agency text messages. The U.S. government’s chief record-keeper asked the Secret Service to report back to the Archives within 30 days about the deletion of any records, including describing what was purged and the circumstances of how the documentation was lost.

The law enforcement agency, whose agents have been embroiled in the Jan. 6 investigation because of their role shadowing and planning President Donald Trump’s movements that day, is expected to share this conclusion with the Jan. 6 committee in response to its Friday subpoena for texts and other records.


The agency, which made this determination after reviewing its communication databases over the past four days, will provide thousands of records, but nearly all of them have been shared previously with an agency watchdog and congressional committees, the senior official said. None is expected to shed new light on the key matters the committee is probing, including whether Trump attacked a Secret Service agent, an account a senior White House aide described to the Jan. 6 committee.

Many of its agents’ cellphone texts were permanently purged starting in mid-January 2021 and Secret Service officials said it was the result of an agencywide reset of staff telephones and replacement that it began planning months earlier. Secret Service agents, many of whom protect the president, vice president and other senior government leaders, were instructed to upload any old text messages involving government business to an internal agency drive before the reset, the senior official said, but many agents appear not to have done so.

The result is that potentially valuable evidence — the real-time communications and reactions of agents who interacted directly with Trump or helped coordinate his plans before and during Jan. 6 — is unlikely to ever be recovered, two people familiar with the Secret Service communications system said. They requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters without agency authorization.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, incursion into the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters issued a subpoena to the U.S. Secret Service on Friday requesting phone, after-action reports and other records relating to that time.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General upended the committee’s investigation last week claiming the Secret Service had erased texts from around Jan. 5 and 6 after his office had requested them as part of his own investigation.

DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, a Trump appointee, briefed members of the House select committee on Friday after sending a letter to lawmakers last week informing them that the text messages were missing. He also said DHS officials were delaying turning over information he requested, which Homeland Security officials have denied.

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi has said that the agency did not maliciously delete text messages and that the Secret Service had lost some data because of a previously planned agencywide replacement of staff telephones. The replacement began a month before the Office of Inspector General made his request, he said last week.

Guglielmi acknowledged that some data on the phones had been lost in the changeover but emphasized that “none of the texts” the OIG was seeking were missing.

Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) signaled that the subpoena could resolve the discrepancies in the accounts between the OIG and the Secret Service, which falls under DHS.

The text messages could provide the committee with more details about the actions of Secret Service agents and of the former president around the time of the attack on the Capitol.

Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified during a hearing last month that Trump wanted to lead the mob from the Ellipse to the Capitol, despite knowing they were armed, and said that she was told by an agent that Trump physically assailed the Secret Service agent who informed him he could not go to the Capitol. She did not witness that alleged episode.

The Secret Service’s text messages have become a new focal point of Congress’s investigation of Jan. 6, as they could provide insight into the agency’s actions on the day of the insurrection and possibly those of Trump. A former White House aide last month told the House select committee investigating the assault on the Capitol that Trump was alerted by the Secret Service on the morning of Jan. 6 that his supporters were armed but insisted they be allowed to enter his rally on the Ellipse with their weapons.

Trump told multiple White House aides that he wanted to lead the crowd to the Capitol and indicated his supporters were right to chant about hanging Vice President Mike Pence, all pieces of evidence that help describe his state of mind and what he wanted to happen at the Capitol that day.
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SilentPony

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I mean obviously the Secret Service was in on this. They're basically the presidents private army, and at least back then they were filled with agents more loyal to Trump than to the nation. I hope Biden has removed those men, 'cause they would absolutely put a bullet in him for Trump given half the chance.
 

Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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I mean obviously the Secret Service was in on this. They're basically the presidents private army, and at least back then they were filled with agents more loyal to Trump than to the nation. I hope Biden has removed those men, 'cause they would absolutely put a bullet in him for Trump given half the chance.
Conveniently disappearing a load of texts does indeed suggest that the Secret Service had something to hide.

There are reports Trump carried out some sort of purge part-way through his presidency, where he may have placed a significant number of loyalists in it. However, it's also possible that it was compromised less intentionally simply by the extreme behaviour of Trump. Where people are put in a difficult position where they are pressured by their Commander-in-Chief to act against rules and regulations, in at least some occasions agents will have been likely to overstep the boundary.
 

SilentPony

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So assuming this is the final meeting, which may or may not be true, my verdict of the Jan 6th investigation is...complete and utter waste of time.
No one was convinced of a thing. No Trumpist suddenly saw the light, not Republican is jumping ship, and no Democrat views Jan 6th any worse than they already did. Trump will find a scapegoat if the Justice Department has the balls to bring any charges at all, which they won't. Nothing will happen as a result of this. Trump won't see one second in a court house, no one involved in the planning will face any consequences, Democrats aren't smart enough to capitalize on this for the midterms, and when the Republicans take over both chambers again they'll start a counter-committee investigation into the stealing of the 2020 election that will get way more coverage and get every Republican to come out and demand immediate charges against Biden and Harris. And that will probably happen.
 
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