The left has a new enemy in their saga to make January 6th the preeminent issue of our time: The US Secret Service.
Reports have been flying around asserting that the Secret Service deleted text messages dating to the time of the unrest at the Capitol Building. That was confirmed on Tuesday, after officials announced that there are no new texts to provide to the January 6th committee that are relevant to its “investigation.” Any others of concern have already been purged, though, the agency insists there was no purposeful malicious action in doing so.
That comes via The Washington Post, which is now sounding the alarm about possible illegality by the Secret Service.
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.
How many times can one committee chase its own tail? Every single time Liz Cheney and crew hit a dead end, we are assured that if they just had “this” piece of unobtainable “evidence,” the entire Trump “insurrection” conspiracy would be proved true. Committee Chair Bennie Thompson is even quoted as believing these text messages could provide critical details about the Secret Service’s involvement on January 6th.
Do you see where this is going? The January 6th committee has absolutely nothing to prove their grand theory of a Trump-led coup, so now they are looking for a scapegoat to blame their failure on. You see, it wasn’t that their entire investigation was dumb, partisan, and pointless. It’s that it was thwarted by that dastardly Secret Service deleting text messages as part of a phone upgrade. And surely those missing messages provide the smoking gun, right?
The entire thing is farcical. What does the committee think the Secret Service was doing on January 6th? Does anyone really think its leadership and agents were part of an attempt to take over the government? Besides, the deletion of the text messages is being defended by Joe Biden’s own appointee. Is the theory now that Biden officials are pro-January 6th?
As to whether any laws regarding record keeping were broken here, I doubt it. It seems that the Secret Service has the receipts to show the phone issues were months in the making and did not happen suddenly after January 6th. So, while the press fret and the committee fumes, there’s very little that is likely to come from this. They’ll just have to look elsewhere for their “evidence” of an organized coup that didn’t happen.