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      The January 6 hearings are a brilliant spectacle. That’s also their danger | Stephen Marche

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      The January 6 hearings are a brilliant spectacle. That’s also their dangerStephen MarcheIf the hearings end without consequences for Trump, the main takeaway will be: this is how much you can get away with in 2020s America You have to say this for America in 2022. They know how to put on a show. The January 6 hearings in Washington have made for riveting viewing. Someday the last days of Trump will be turned into a movie, and it will make a worthy successor to films about political collapse like Downfall or The Damned. The testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, a surprise witness – just like in the movies! – offered one hit scene after another: the president of the United States saying he didn’t much care whether his own vice-president was hanged; Trump lunging for the steering wheel; the ketchup dripping down the wall after he threw his lunch. The last planned public hearing is scheduled for Thursday. CNN describes the event as having “all the makings of a potential blockbuster”. But the hearings already have been a massively successful work of political spectacle; and that’s where their danger lies.The organizers of the January 6 hearings had no choice but to resort to showmanship. They clearly learned the lesson of the Mueller report. When Mueller gathered the findings of his investigation into the Trump campaign’s expectation to “benefit electorally” from Russian disinformation campaigns, he released them as a book. He may as well have put his findings in a bottle and thrown them into the sea. Americans don’t go to books to understand the world any more. They go to their screens. That’s one of the most prominent truths revealed by the Trump years: spectacle wins. The sheer capacity to gather attention is, by far, the most important force in US politics.On that level, the January 6 hearings have been a resounding success. The ratings have been superb. Nearly 20 million people watched the first prime time hearing, which puts it roughly on the level of Sunday Night Football. Not only have the hearings managed a large audience, but the narrative they are telling has registered. Republican megadonors no longer find Trump as appealing as they once did, at least this week, and several conservative legal scholars have declared that the hearings have changed their minds on his culpability, whether that matters or not.But as the hearings come to a close, the very success of their presentation presents a very real danger to the republic they purport to be saving. With every display of some new idiocy or corruption, whether it’s the random presence of the former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne in the events leading up to the near-fall of the United States, or Jason Van Tatenhove’s description of “armed revolution”, the same question rears its threatening head: So what?If the January 6 hearings turn out to be mere spectacle, they will have been a complete disaster. The Trump years revealed something other than that spectacle wins. They also revealed that the American system of government is basically a collection of habits and expectations. The actual structure of American government is crumbling plaster and cobwebs. Anyone who wants to can shred it with a gesture. American democracy is hanging on by the skin of its norms. And the hearings are, quite by accident, shifting those norms.American tolerance for political illegitimacy grows by way of exposure. Weekly, sometimes daily, the American public is shown some new completely unacceptable abuse of power. The revelations don’t make any difference or have any consequences. And as the American tolerance for political illegitimacy grows, the size of the monstrosity the country will accept swells. The January 6 committee has gathered the attention of the American people admirably. But now the country and the world are learning from what they’re watching. It’s not just liberals eagerly anticipating the exposure of the grifters and buffoons surrounding the president in his final days in office. Republican officials and white power movements are watching, too. And both sides are asking themselves one principal question: What can you get away with in America in the 2020s?Every time the January 6 committee reveals a new crime and the committee members spread their arms to the American public as if to say “Are you willing to have this done in your name?” they are not asking a rhetorical question. Every crime the committee shows that goes unpunished moves the line of acceptable political behavior in the United States a little lower.They have now put themselves in a situation where action is required: Arrest Donald Trump or accept a political future without standards or guardrails. But you can’t arrest Donald Trump with a camera.In our screen-addled culture, political spectacle is a requirement; no one can attain or wield power without it. In the end, if the spectacle doesn’t result in change, it only adds to the despair and futility dragging the American political system down. Trump was the reality television president. His term in office turned the United States into a four-year-long episode of The Real Housewives of Washington. The January 6 Committee has used the master’s tools against him; they have shown that spectacle can be used against misinformation. But a show is not a system of government. And when the show comes to an end, what will be left behind? This article was amended on 21 July 2022. An earlier version incorrectly described Patrick Byrne as the CEO of Overstock; he resigned and sold his ownership in 2019.
      Stephen Marche is the author, most recently, of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future
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      January 6 hearings return to recount 187 minutes of chaos at the Capitol

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      January 6 hearings return to recount 187 minutes of chaos at the CapitolCapitol attack committee plans to provide detailed account of insurrection and suggests this will not be final hearing The January 6 committee is returning to primetime. The House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection will hold its eighth and final – for now, at least – public hearing on Thursday night.Like the first hearing, Thursday’s event will take place in the evening, as the panel seeks to capture the widest possible audience for its presentation. The first hearing, which was held last month, was watched by at least 20 million people.The eighth hearing will detail the 187 minutes that passed between the start and the end of the insurrection on that winter afternoon in 2021, as a mass of Donald Trump’s more extreme supporters overran the US Capitol in a vain attempt to disrupt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the November 2020 presidential election.Democrat Elaine Luria, who will co-lead the Thursday hearing with fellow panel member and Republican Adam Kinzinger, said the committee will provide a “minute-by-minute” account of the insurrection, as Trump failed to quell the violence that left several people dead.“He didn’t act. He had a duty to act. So we will address that in a lot of detail,” Luria said Sunday. “And from that, we will build on the information that we provided in the earlier hearings.”One central committee member, Democratic chair Bennie Thompson, will not be attending the hearing in person. Thompson tested positive for coronavirus on Monday, but will chair the hearing remotely, a committee aide said.Two former Trump White House aides who resigned shortly after January 6, Matthew Pottinger and Sarah Matthews, are expected to testify on Thursday.Pottinger served in the Trump administration for four years and resigned as a deputy national security adviser, while Matthews was a White House press aide.When she announced her resignation last year, Matthews expressed dismay about the events of January 6, and she has continued to criticize Trump.After former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson appeared before the select committee last month, Matthews came to her defense, even as some of Trump’s allies dismissed the shocking testimony as “hearsay”.“Anyone downplaying Cassidy Hutchinson’s role or her access in the West Wing either doesn’t understand how the Trump [White House] worked or is attempting to discredit her because they’re scared of how damning this testimony is,” Matthews said on Twitter at the time.Anyone downplaying Cassidy Hutchinson’s role or her access in the West Wing either doesn’t understand how the Trump WH worked or is attempting to discredit her because they’re scared of how damning this testimony is.— Sarah Matthews (@SarahAMatthews1) June 28, 2022
      Hutchinson’s testimony is expected to feature prominently in the Thursday hearing. In her appearance before the committee, Hutchinson, a former adviser to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, painted a damning picture of an increasingly chaotic White House led by a president determined to hold on to power, even after he was repeatedly told he had fairly lost the election, including by his own attorney general, William Barr.According to Hutchinson, Trump was aware that some of his supporters were armed on January 6, yet he still encouraged them to march to the Capitol after he spoke at a rally near the White House.Hutchinson also provided a secondhand account of Trump grabbing for the steering wheel of a vehicle in a desperate attempt to go to the Capitol with his supporters, having said at the rally “I’ll be there with you”. Instead he returned to the White House.01:42Some of Hutchinson’s testimony relied on comments she heard from Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House counsel. Cipollone privately spoke to the January 6 investigators shortly after Hutchinson testified, and the committee is expected to show more of his interview during the Thursday hearing.The committee had also hoped to gather more information from the US Secret Service before the Thursday hearing, about Trump and Pence’s movements on the day, but that effort is proving far more difficult than anticipated. After receiving a subpoena for all agency communications on January 5 and 6, the Secret Service turned over just one text message to the select committee, an aide to the panel confirmed.The committee has promised to continue collecting information from important witnesses as it works to compile a comprehensive report on the Capitol attack by this fall, and additional hearings are still possible later in the summer.“There is no reason to think that this is going to be the select committee’s final hearing,” a committee aide said Wednesday. “The multi-step plan, overseen and directed by the former president, to overturn the results of the election and block the transfer of power couldn’t be clearer from the information that we’ve laid out. We expect that [the panel] is going to continue telling that story.”TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

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      Trump as tyrant and Cheney’s cliffhangers: key moments from the January 6 hearings

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      Trump as tyrant and Cheney’s cliffhangers: key moments from the January 6 hearingsFrom Trump’s lack of concern about armed rioters to possible witness tampering, the revelations have been startling The hearings of the House January 6 committee have presented some extraordinary testimony about Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his supporters’ deadly assault on the US Capitol. Ahead of the primetime TV hearing on Thursday night, here are some of those pivotal moments so far.Hutchinson’s bombshellsSome said that in Cassidy Hutchinson the committee had found its John Dean, the White House counsel who turned on Richard Nixon during Watergate.01:42Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, delivered her dramatic testimony with notable calm. She made headlines by describing how Trump struggled physically with a Secret Service agent who would not let him march to the Capitol himself, and how the president, furious, hurled his dinner at the White House wall.More importantly, Hutchinson described how Trump knew some in the crowd who heard him speak on January 6 were armed – and told them to march on the Capitol anyway. Many observers said such testimony could be crucial to establishing criminal intent, and therefore central to any criminal charges against Trump.Van Tatenhove’s warningJason van Tatenhove, a former spokesperson for the far-right group the Oath Keepers, testified about links between Trump and the far right. Van Tatenhove said the president attempted to mount “armed revolution”. He also said the Oath Keepers leader once asked him to create a deck of cards showing key targets, among them Hillary Clinton.01:10“People died [on 6 January 2021],” Van Tatenhove said. “Law enforcement officers died, there was a gallows set up in front of the Capitol.“This could have been the spark that started a new civil war, and no one would have won there. That would have been good for no one.”Cheney’s cliffhangersLiz Cheney has been the star of the hearings. A hardline Wyoming Republican nonetheless at odds with her party, she has offered successive cliffhangers, each setting up the next session. One was about Trump advisers and allies in Congress seeking pardons. But what she said about possible witness tampering made, perhaps, the biggest impact. In the Hutchinson hearing, Cheney revealed that Trump associates had contacted a witness to say the former president would be watching the hearings and reading transcripts. The witness turned out to be Hutchinson. After the hearing on far-right links to Trump, Cheney said Trump himself had attempted to call another witness, not yet seen.Trump’s enablersThe committee’s reconstruction of an 18 December 2020 meeting at the White House between Trump’s official and unofficial advisers was for the ages. Witnesses including Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, described shouts and threats from members of so-called “Team Crazy”, which included Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn.Giuliani remembered calling the White House advisers “pussies”. Powell said it was the official aides who were crazy, for not backing a scheme to seize voting machines. She also drank a lot of Dr Pepper.Eric Herschmann, a former Trump Organization lawyer who testified by video in front of a baseball bat with “justice” written on it, said Flynn, a retired general, “screamed at me that I was a quitter and kept standing up and turning around and screaming at me. I’d sort of had it with him so I yelled back, ‘Either come over or sit your fucking ass back down.’” More

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      January 6 panel to show Trump violated law by refusing to stop Capitol attack

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      January 6 panel to show Trump violated law by refusing to stop Capitol attackThe committee will demonstrate the ex-president was ‘derelict in his duty’ to protect the US Congress as supporters mobbed building The January 6 House select committee is expected to make the case at its hearing on Thursday that Donald Trump potentially violated the law when he refused entreaties to take action to stop the 2021 attack on the US Capitol by a mass of his supporters, according to two sources familiar with the matter.Meet the key players who have defined the January 6 hearingsRead moreThe panel will demonstrate that the former Republican president was “derelict in his duty” to protect the US Congress and might have also broken the federal law that prohibits obstructing an official proceeding before Congress, which had gathered to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.Trump could have called on national guard troops to restore order when he saw on TV the melee unfolding at the Capitol, the panel is expected to argue, or he could have called off the rioters via a live broadcast from the White House press briefing room, but he did not. Or he could have sent a tweet trying to stop the violence far earlier than he actually did, during the 187-minute duration of the Capitol attack.The former president instead only reluctantly posted a tweet in the afternoon of January 6, hours after his top advisors at the White House and Republicans allies in Congress repeatedly implored him to intervene, the select committee will show.And the panel is expected to reinforce that Trump’s inaction directly contributed to the extended battle between the US Capitol police and rioters, who outnumbered them, since many rioters dispersed after he tweeted the now-infamous video asking them to leave the Capitol.The sources described what the select committee sees as potential legal culpability for the former president, speaking on the condition of anonymity ahead of the prime time hearing.Among the witnesses for the eighth hearing – characterized by the panel’s members as a “season finale” with more hearings after the summer recess – include Trump’s former deputy national security advisor Matthew Pottinger and former Trump press aide Sarah Matthews.The two witnesses with inside knowledge of how the West Wing operated on January 6 are expected to narrate how that day unfolded, starting with how desperately Trump did not want to return to the White House after delivering his speech at the rally at the nearby Ellipse, where he had urged supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat.Former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified in a previous hearing that Trump was so determined to go to the Capitol alongside his supporters that at one point, infuriated, he attempted to wrestle control of the steering wheel from the Secret Service in the presidential vehicle as they insisted he return to the White House.The Guardian has learned, according to a person directly familiar with the matter, that in a previously unreported incident, the fracas about going to the Capitol, after Trump told his supporters at the rally to go to Congress and “I’ll be there with you”, continued when he arrived back at the White House, and the argument spilled into the West Wing driveway.Pottinger and Matthews are expected to testify about what happened when Trump was back at the White House, including details on Trump in his dining room off the Oval Office, where he watched the Capitol attack erupt on TV, transfixed by the images as rioters overran police and rampaged through the halls of Congress, the sources said.The select committee will show through videotaped testimony from the Trump White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, and other aides, that the former president ignored repeated entreaties from advisers to help stop the Capitol attack, the sources said.Hutchinson previously testified that she tried to get Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to lobby Trump – only for him to tell her that the former president “wanted to be left alone”.The select committee will also show that Trump never once called the national guard or other law enforcement, the sources said.With Trump unwilling to act, the panel is expected to describe how the duties of commander in chief were effectively assumed by then vice-president Mike Pence, who was sheltering in a loading-dock on the Senate-side of the Capitol after lawmakers had to flee the chamber amid the violence.“Trump gave no order to deploy the national guard that day, and made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to coordinate and deploy law enforcement assets,” the panel’s vice-chair, Liz Cheney, previously said. “But Mike Pence did each of those things.”The Guardian has also learned, according to another person directly familiar with the matter, that then First Lady, Melania Trump, appeared to choose not to intervene with her husband or try and stop the Capitol attack herself.That day, the person said, Melania Trump was conducting a photoshoot for a new rug for the White House residence and when her then chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham, asked if she wanted to tweet condemning the attack, Melania responded curtly: “No.”Meanwhile, Cipollone told top aides that Trump might have legal liability, the sources said. And the hearing may present more details of the calls that mounted after the insurrection for Pence to convene the Cabinet and remove Trump from office through the 25th Amendment.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpMelania TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Meet the key players who have defined the January 6 hearings

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      Meet the key players who have defined the January 6 hearingsAs the eighth public hearing begins, know the people who helped understand Trump’s efforts to overturn the election The House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol has introduced Americans to a cast of characters critical to understanding then president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn a free and fair democratic election. Arizona Republican censured by party over testimony on resisting TrumpRead moreThe committee interviewed hundreds of witnesses during its yearlong investigation into the 2021 insurrection and the events that led to it. Some appeared in person, others taped depositions that were played during the hearings. Some pled the fifth or refused to cooperate.Here are the major players who have defined the January 6 hearings.Bennie ThompsonMississippi Democratic congressman Bennie Thompson, 74, was chosen by House speaker Nancy Pelosi to lead the panel, the capstone of a career devoted to protecting voting rights. He grew up in the racially-segregated south, an experience he has cited as a reminder that antidemocratic forces are as old as the nation itself.With his solemn, reverent tone, the chairman has essentially acted as narrator of the story of a democracy in peril. Thompson will chair Thursday’s hearing remotely due to a Covid-19 diagnosis. Liz CheneyWyoming Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney has led the charge against erstwhile colleague Donald Trump, acting as the panel’s top prosecutor. Unsparring and matter-of-fact, the committee vice-chair has provided some of the hearing’s most shocking revelations, among them that Trump appeared to endorse his supporters’ chants to “hang Mike Pence” for the then vice-president’s refusal to try to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory, and that the former president had sought to contact a committee witness.Cheney, the 55-year-old daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, is one of the few in her party willing to criticize the former president, though her dogged efforts to hold Trump accountable for the insurrection could cost her a seat in Congress as she faces a Trump-backed primary challenge. Cassidy HutchinsonA former aide to Trump’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson provided the committee – and the country – with damning testimony.Hutchinson described a president spiraling out of control as he clung to power. She recalled Meadows, who refused to cooperate with the committee, warning that “things might get real bad” on 6 January.Hutchinson described violent outbursts by Trump and testified under oath that he knew some of his supporters were armed when he directed them to march to the Capitol.Hutchinson has been likened to John Dean, a key witness in the Watergate hearings. But her turn from junior White House staffer to star witness has drawn harsh scrutiny from those she once worked alongside, including Trump. She has stood by her testimony.Pat CipollonePat Cipollone, Trump’s second and final White House counsel recently appeared before the January 6 committee, after it subpoenaed him following Hutchinson’s testimony. Cipollone resisted Trump’s schemes to reverse the election and believed he should concede.Cipollone attended meetings at which Trump’s efforts to subvert the election were discussed, including a December 2020 confrontation just before Trump sent a tweet the committee described as a “call to arms” to extremist supporters. Cipollone said he asked informal advisors pushing wild claims of voter fraud: “where is the evidence?” They never provided it.Rudy Giuliani and Sidney PowellRudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and Sidney Powell, a lawyer for Trump’s 2020 campaign, led the unsuccessful legal campaign to overturn the 2020 election based on spurious claims of voter fraud. Called “Team crazy” by White House officials, Giuliani, Powell and a group of others promoted outlandish conspiracy theories and tactics, including citing far-fetched plots involving hacked thermostats, a deceased former leader of Venezuela and a push to seize voting machines.As a result of their efforts to subvert the election, Giuliani had his law license in New York suspended and is ensnared in a Georgia investigation. Powell is facing disbarment in Texas. John EastmanJohn Eastman was a conservative law professor in California before he became a key figure in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Eastman devised a brazen plan that vice-president Mike Pence could unilaterally block or delay Congress’ certification of the electoral college results, which finalized Biden’s victory.In a legal memo, Eastman mapped out the actions Pence could take to thwart Congress from counting the electoral votes, an unprecedented deviation from the vice-president’s ceremonial role in the process. A June hearing revealed that Eastman warned Trump that the plan was illegal.A federal judge determined that he and Trump “more likely than not” attempted to illegally obstruct Congress.Jeff ClarkA former mid-level justice department official, Jeff Clark worked closely with Trump to undo the 2020 election. He proposed sending a letter to Georgia and other closely-contested states that falsely claimed the justice department had “identified significant concerns” with the results.In a June hearing, his superiors at the department testified that any assertion the department had substantiated claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election were brazenly false. Clark sought, ultimately unsuccessfully, to persuade Trump to install him as the acting attorney general. Last month, Clark said federal agents searched his home as part of the separate Department of Justice investigation into the 6 January 2021 attack and election subversion efforts.Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss and Ruby FreemanShaye Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, poll workers in Fulton county, Georgia, had their lives upended when Giuliani placed them at the center of an election-rigging conspiracy. Though the claims were baseless, the women’s testimony described in wrenching detail the very real consequences of Trump’s lie that he had won the 2020 election.Freeman, known as Lady Ruby, told the committee she had lost her sense of security. Her daughter, who testified publicly, said she received a torrent of racist and “hateful” messages on social media. Election-result deniers even showed up at her grandmother’s house claiming they could make a “citizen’s arrest” of the poll workers.Moss was awarded the John F Kennedy profile in courage award for her “hard and unseen work to run our democracy”.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansDonald TrumpRudy GiulianifeaturesReuse this content More

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      Arizona Republican censured by party over testimony on resisting Trump

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      Arizona Republican censured by party over testimony on resisting TrumpRusty Bowers, the Arizona house speaker, testified to the House January 6 committee in June Rusty Bowers, the Arizona house speaker who testified to the January 6 committee about how he resisted Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in the sun belt state, has been formally censured by his own Republican party.Kelli Ward, chair of the Arizona Republican party, said on Tuesday its “executive committee formally censured Rusty Bowers tonight – he is no longer a Republican in good standing and we call on Republicans to replace him at the ballot box in the August primary”.Secret Service turned over just one text message to January 6 panel, sources sayRead moreWard released a copy of the formal censure, which included “killing all meaningful election integrity bills” among Bowers’ alleged misdeeds and called on Arizona voters to “expel him permanently from office”.Bowers testified to the House January 6 committee on 21 June. Discussing Trump’s claim that Bowers told him the Arizona election was “rigged”, Bowers said: “Anyone, anywhere, anytime I said the election was rigged, that would not be true.”Bowers also recalled a conversation with Rudy Giuliani in which Trump’s personal lawyer, a key player in the attempt to prove mass electoral fraud, allegedly said: “We’ve got lots of theories but we just don’t have the evidence.”Bowers also spoke about how his Christian faith motivated his defiance of Trump, and described threats made to his safety by Trump supporters while his daughter lay mortally ill.Like Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the January 6 committee and its vice-chair, Bowers was given a Profile in Courage award for his resistance to Trump.After the hearing at which he appeared, though, it emerged that Bowers had previously told the Associated Press: “If [Trump] is the nominee [in 2024], if he was up against [Joe] Biden, I’d vote for him again. Simply because what he did the first time, before Covid, was so good for the country. In my view it was great.”This month, Bowers told the Deseret News he might have changed his mind.“I don’t want the choice of having to look at [Trump] again,” he said. “And if it comes, I’ll be hard pressed. I don’t know what I’ll do.“But I’m not inclined to support him. Because he doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the morals and the platform of my party …“That guy is just – he’s his own party. It’s a party of intimidation and I don’t like it. So I’m not going to be boxed by, ‘Who am I gonna vote for?’ Because that’s between me and God. But I’m not happy with him.“And I’m not happy with the thought that a robust primary can’t produce somebody better than Trump, for crying out loud.”He also told Business Insider: “Much of what [Trump] has done has been tyrannical, especially of late. I think that there are elements of tyranny that anybody can practice on any given day, and I feel like I’ve seen a lot of it.”TopicsArizonaRepublicansUS politicsJanuary 6 hearingsnewsReuse this content More

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      Secret Service turned over just one text message to January 6 panel, sources say

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      Secret Service turned over just one text message to January 6 panel, sources sayHouse committee wants all communications from day before and day of Capitol attack but agency indicates such messages are lost The Secret Service turned over just one text message to the House January 6 committee on Tuesday, in response to a subpoena compelling the production of all communications from the day before and the day of the US Capitol attack, according to two sources familiar with the matter.Primetime January 6 hearing to go ahead despite chairman’s positive Covid testRead moreThe Secret Service told the panel the single text was the only message responsive to the subpoena, the sources said, and while the agency vowed to conduct a forensic search for any other text or phone records, it indicated such messages were likely to prove irrecoverable.House investigators also learned that the texts were seemingly lost as part of an agency-wide reset of phones on 27 January 2021, the sources said – 11 days after Congress first requested the communications and two days after agents were reminded to back up their phones.The disclosures were worse than the committee had anticipated, the sources said. The panel had hoped to receive more than a single text and was dismayed to learn that the messages were lost even after they had been requested for congressional investigations.It marked a damaging day for the Secret Service, which is required to preserve records like any other executive branch agency, and now finds itself in the crosshairs of the select committee examining its response with respect to the Capitol attack.The circumstances surrounding the erasure of the Secret Service texts have become central to the January 6 committee’s work as it investigates how agents and leaders planned to move Donald Trump and Mike Pence as violence unfolded at the Capitol.The controversy – and the subpoena – over the lost text messages came last week after the Department of Homeland Security inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, the watchdog for the Secret Service, revealed many messages from the time in question had gone missing.In a letter to Congress, the inspector general said some Secret Service texts from 5 and 6 January 2021 were erased amid a “device replacement program” and indicated that the agency was stonewalling his investigation by slow-walking the production of evidence.The Secret Service has said the missing texts were purged as part of a planned agency-wide reset of phones and replacement of devices. Agents were told to back up data to an internal drive, one source said, but that directive appears to have been ignored.Hours after the complaint letter from Cuffari, the chair of the January 6 committee, Bennie Thompson, met the panel’s staff director, David Buckley, and his deputy, Kristin Amerling, before convening members to request a closed-door briefing from the inspector general.The Guardian first reported the inspector general told the committee the Secret Service’s account of why the texts went missing kept changing, among other issues, prompting the panel to issue a subpoena for the texts and after-action reports later the same day.But even as the Secret Service complied with the subpoena, and produced thousands of pages of documents related to decisions made on the day of the Capitol attack, the agency could provide just one text message, the sources said.The Secret Service was also unable to provide any after-action reports, the sources said, because none were conducted. Cuffari said the agency opted to use his review as the after-action report – only for personnel to slow-walk his investigation, the sources said.A spokesman for the Secret Service could not immediately be reached for comment.The fallout from the missing text messages episode, as well as testimony from former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson describing a fracas inside the presidential vehicle on January 6 as Trump tried to reach for the steering wheel, has renewed questions over credibility.According to the Secret Service, the sequence of events was as follows: agents were told of a forthcoming update in December 2020, Congress requested communications on 16 January 2021, agents were reminded to back-up data on 25 January and the update went through on 27 January 2021.The agents were told in the reminder about “how to save information that they were obligated or desired to preserve so that no pertinent data or federal records” were lost, though the note seemingly went unheeded and texts were purged.House investigators are currently discussing with the inspector general the possibility of reconstructing the lost texts, the sources said, examining options including acquiring specialized software and forensic tools.The justice department inspector general has been able to retrieve lost texts, recovering messages in 2018 from two senior FBI officials who investigated former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Trump and exchanged notes criticizing the latter.The Secret Service was not responsible for security at the Capitol on January 6 – that is performed by US Capitol police – but agents led protection details for Trump, Pence, and other executive branch officials across Washington that day.But Secret Service actions have become a focus for House investigators as they investigate whether and when the agency knew Trump wanted to go to the Capitol, and whether it intended to remove Pence from the complex as rioters sought to stop certification of Joe Biden’s election win.The missing texts are also the subject of a new investigation, after the National Archives told the Secret Service to launch an internal review and issue a report within 30 calendar days, if it found that any texts were “improperly deleted”.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsSecret ServiceUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesTrump administrationnewsReuse this content More

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      Secret Service told to begin an inquiry into erased January 6 text messages

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      Secret Service told to begin an inquiry into erased January 6 text messagesThe National Archives asked the agency to report in a month on whether messages were ‘improperly deleted’ The US National Archives has asked the Secret Service to conduct an internal investigation over “erased” text messages from the day before and the day of the Capitol attack, according to a letter sent to the agency’s records management officer on Tuesday.Primetime January 6 hearing to go ahead despite chairman’s positive Covid testRead moreThe request marks the latest escalation of the matter after the watchdog for the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general, notified Congress he had sought the texts only to be told they no longer existed.In the letter sent to the Secret Service records officer, reviewed by the Guardian, the National Archives requested the agency launch an internal review and report within 30 calendar days if it finds any texts were “improperly deleted”.The letter noted that the Secret Service was required to produce a report by law, and that it must report its findings regardless of whether the erased texts were relevant to the inspector general’s inquiry or the House January 6 investigation.“This report must include a complete description of the records affected,” the National Archives said, “a statement of the exact circumstances surrounding the deletion of messages [and] all agency actions taken to salvage, retrieve, or reconstruct the records.”The value of asking the Secret Service to conduct an investigation into itself about messages its own personnel appear to have deleted was not immediately clear, given the agency, the inspector general said, has already slow-walked his internal review.In a statement, a Secret Service spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, said the agency “respects and supports the important role of the National Archives and Records Administration in ensuring preservation of government records. They will have our full cooperation in this review.”The circumstances surrounding the erasure of the Secret Service texts have become central for the January 6 committee as it investigates how agents planned to move Donald Trump and Mike Pence as the violence unfolded.The controversy over the erased texts erupted last week after the letter from the inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, became public, and the committee went into overdrive to assess the impact on its investigation.In the letter, the inspector general said certain Secret Service texts from 5 and 6 January 2021 were erased amid a “device replacement program” even after he requested the messages for his internal inquiry.The Secret Service has disputed that, saying in a statement that data on some phones were lost as part of a pre-planned “system migration” in January 2021, and that Cuffari’s initial request for communications came weeks later, in late February.But the committee has questioned the Secret Service’s emphasis on that date, according to sources close to the inquiry, noting that the first request for Secret Service communications came from Congress, just 10 days after the Capitol attack.Bennie Thompson, chair of the committee, met the staff director, David Buckley, and deputy director, Kristen Amerling, after he received Cuffari’s letter, and the full panel promptly asked for a briefing on the matter.At the briefing, the Guardian first reported, Cuffari told the committee the Secret Service’s story about how the texts disappeared kept shifting. At one point it was because of a software upgrade. At another it was because devices were swapped out.Hours after the briefing, the committee issued a subpoena for any texts that had not been erased, as well as any after-action reports the agency might have conducted into its response to January 6.Regardless of how the messages were lost from individual devices, the Secret Service, like any other executive branch agency, is supposed to back up data and messages so government records are preserved.But the Secret Service has often flouted that rule, according to a source familiar with the matter, and critical communications have in the past repeatedly gone missing as soon as the Secret Service has become the subject of oversight or internal investigations.At the briefing to the committee last week, the Guardian also reported, Cuffari discussed the feasibility of using forensic tools to reconstruct the missing texts, something the justice department has previously been able to do as recently as 2018.TopicsUS Capitol attackSecret ServiceNational ArchivesJanuary 6 hearingsnewsReuse this content More