We learned this week that the United States Secret Service may have deleted thousands of text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, raising questions about whether or not the agency tasked with protecting the president might be complicit in the illegal plot to overturn the results of the 2020 election and allow Donald Trump to remain in office.
NBC News reports that the Secret Service denies they destroyed any potential evidence:
Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesperson for the Secret Service, has called allegations that the agency deleted messages categorically false. During a “pre-planned, three-month system migration,” he said, data on some phones was lost but that none of the text messages being sought was permanently deleted. Guglielmi also insisted that the Secret Service would respond “swiftly to the Committee’s subpoena.”
On Sunday, former impeachment lawyer and White House ethics czar Norm Eisen was a guest on CNN and said the real issue about the text messages is the connections Secret Service agents may have to crimes committed by Trump:
“I think that the questions have a larger significance than just whether texts were lost or not. I’m more concerned that after Cassidy Hutchinson testified, after the blockbuster testimony about Donald Trump’s anger that he couldn’t go to the Capitol, that some in the Secret Service seem to be part of an anonymous whisper campaign disagreeing with her story. Mr. [Anthony] Ornato, Mr. [Bobby] Engel. And then you find out there have been other witnesses who have come forward and pushed back on that, including a member of the MPD. And now we find out that documents may be missing from the critical days of the 5th and the 6th.”
That, Eisen added, suggests that members of Trump’s security detail while he was president could be facing obstruction of justice charges:
“Was there any intentional effort to obstruct justice here as part of Donald Trump’s Secret Service agents being too close to Donald Trump? We don’t know the answer, but that needs to get a hard look from the service, from Congress, and from the Department of Justice.”
Eisen concluded by noting that he expects the Jan. 6 committee will get to the bottom of what happened with the Secret Service, Trump, and any crimes any unusual patterns of behavior, suggesting that would include “the Secret Service agents who may have been a little too close to Mr. Trump. Were they part of an effort to intimidate Cassidy Hutchinson? We need answers on the lost documents and on the behavior of these individuals.”
