The hits just keep on comin’ — investigators with the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog were prepared to slam the Secret Service in a public report for stonewalling their Jan. 6 probe and for having wiped texts from the day of the riot. But a funny thing happened on the way to the PDF generator:
On April 1, attorneys working in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General approved five detailed paragraphs of language that would have alerted Congress to the Secret Service’s deletion of texts related to January 6, according to new documents obtained by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) and congressional staffers on multiple committees.
Yet Inspector General Joseph Cuffari never sent this detailed alert. Instead, the records show that Cuffari not only failed to alert Congress in a timely way about the erased texts, but failed to adopt his staff’s explicit recommendations that he do so.
His office had known of the missing texts for weeks, if not longer, at this point. According to a key paragraph of the April 1 alert, which is not public and appears for the first time here:
On February 23, 2022—more than 2 months after OIG renewed its requests for select Secret Service employees’ text messages—Secret Service claimed inability to extract text message content due to an April 2021 mobile phone system migration, which wiped all data.
[…] Career staff across several DHS Office of Inspector General teams working on January 6 reviews — including the watchdog’s own Office of Counsel — approved the detailed language. On April 1, it was sent to an office run by Inspector General Joseph Cuffari’s chief of staff, Kristen Fredricks. Fredricks, along with Cuffari’s top deputy, had been embroiled in an earlier, previously unreported controversy involving the failure to notify hundreds of victims of a privacy data breach at the Social Security Administration, as well as alleged retaliation. The language about the deleted Secret Service texts was bottled up and never published after it was sent to Fredricks’ office.
If the omitted grafs had been included in the report, they would have alerted the public to the missing texts a month before Cuffari notified Congress about the Secret Service deleting its text messages, though there might not have been anything that could be done about it.
The draft also shows OIG wasn’t going to mince words about the pushback on their efforts from the Secret Service:
Secret Service caused significant delay by not clearly communicating this highly relevant information at the outset of its exchanges with OIG during this reporting period. Moreover, Secret Service has not explained why it did not preserve the texts prior to the migration.
It somehow gets even worse:
Not only was Cuffari’s July 13 letter to Congress too late, it contained far too little. The one-page notice also wrongly implied that only texts from January 5 and 6, 2021 were erased.
This error was not in the April 1, 2022, language that DHS inspector general attorneys had previously approved. In fact, sources say, the missing Secret Service texts actually cover January 1-8, 2021, not just January 5 and 6.
The POGO piece describes other instances where the Secret Service tried to stonewall the investigation, such as agents not providing documents to the IG without “internal review”. The Secret Service also refused to identify who the reviewers were, and while they eventually complied with requests for clarification from the IG office, they also introduced numerous delays. Cuffari chose to omit all this info from his report to Congress. Why is he still there?