It was a ‘bombshell’ revelation that fizzled as quickly as it had blown up in the mainstream media: Former President Donald Trump had allegedly attempted to hijack ‘the Beast’ and commandeer it for a one-man rescue operation to assist his unarmed cadres at the Capitol building to somehow overturn the 2020 election.
But nearly as soon as the claim came out of the mouth of the January 6 committee’s ‘star witness’ Cassidy Hutchinson in late June, Secret Service agents began lining up with offers to testify that her narrative was completely bogus and without merit.
Now, there is a ‘convenient’ wrinkle in the story: The Secret Service texts that would prove that Hutchinson’s story was entirely fictional have disappeared. The Washington Post reported on the missing Secret Service communications on Tuesday.
“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,” the Post reported.
“Also, the National Archives on Tuesday sought more information on ‘the potential unauthorized deletion’ of agency text messages,” the report continued. “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.”
This is where the report gets really interesting.
“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,” the report said.
“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,” the report added. “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.”
Whether or not the texts were scrubbed in a Clintonian ‘bleachbit’ operation is unknown. However, we know the Biden administration is prone to keeping potentially exculpatory (or damning) information from the public by the way it has sat on 14,000 hours of surveillance footage from January 6.
The texts are not really necessary to know that Cassidy Hutchinson gave false testimony to Congress, however. Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino vivisected the claims in a takedown video that is must-watch.
Current Founder, CEO and Chief Editor of Becker News. Former Writer & Associate Producer at Fox News for #1 top-rated prime-time cable news show. Former Director of Viral Media and Senior Managing Editor for award-winning startup website IJReview, which grew to a readership of 20-30 million Americans a month. Led editorial and social media team that was #1 ranked news & politics publisher on Facebook for story engagement. Writer whose thousands of digital articles have been read by over 100 million unique users.