July 17 (UPI) — House Jan. 6 committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren said Sunday that the panel expects to receive U.S. Secret Service texts from the day of the 2021 riots and the day prior by Tuesday.
The committee investigating the riots at the U.S. Capitol subpoenaed records from the Secret Service on Friday after a government watchdog said that the agency erased texts from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021.
“We expect to get them by this Tuesday. So we’ll see,” Lofgren, D-Calif., told ABC News “This Week.” “We need all the texts from the 5th and the 6th of January.”
“We need to get this information to get the full picture,” Lofgren added.
Lofgren also said she was “shocked to hear” that the agency did not back up their data before what Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi called a “pre-planned, three-month system migration.”
“You can imagine how shocked we were to get the letter from the inspector general saying that he had been trying to get this information and that they had, in fact, been deleted after he’d asked for them,” she said.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of two Republicans on the committee, told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” that the panel was “going to know more Tuesday” adding that a Secret Service statement provided “conflicting” information as the agency said only some of the records had been deleted and anything relevant to the investigation had been turned over.
“In the very least, it is quite crazy that the Secret Service would actually end up deleting anything related to one of the more infamous days in American history, particularly when it comes to the role of the Secret Service,” said Kinzinger.
Another member of the committee, Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., told CNN’s State of the Union that several questions remained unanswered about the missing text messages.
“One would assume they had done everything possible to preserve those records, to analyze them, to determine what kind of things went right or went wrong that day and their practices and procedures,” she said.
“We want to make sure that we understand the bottom line, like, where are these text messages? Can they be recovered?” Luria added. “And we’ve subpoenaed them because they’re legal records that we need to see for the committee.”
The Secret Service has come under scrutiny since Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, former President Donald Trump‘s chief of staff, testified before the House Jan. 6 committee that Trump lunged toward Secret Service agent Bobby Engel while attempting to take the wheel of the presidential limo — known as “the Beast” — after agents told him he could not go to the Capitol during the riots.
The delivery of the text messages comes ahead of the committee’s final planned meeting on Thursday night where it is set to examine how Trump responded as rioters made their way inside the Capitol.
