These are messages that could be of paramount importance. In the United States, on Friday July 15, the Parliamentary Commission responsible for investigating the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 announced that it had ordered the Secret Service to provide it, by Tuesday, with text messages exchanged by his agents the day before and the day of the assault, according to information reported by Sud Ouest. The Secret Service is notably responsible for protecting the American president.
Joseph V. Cuffari, Inspector General of the Department of National Security, had indicated in a letter to congressional leaders, revealed by The Intercept and published Thursday, that he had encountered difficulties in obtaining Secret Service records that date back to the 5 and January 6, 2021. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Committee investigating the events on Capitol Hill, wrote in a letter released Friday: ‘The Committee is seeking relevant text messages […] related in any way to the events of January 6, 2021.”
Crucial. The missing messages could be of central importance in the work of the House Committee, in order to determine whether Donald Trump and his entourage encouraged the assault on Congress in order to block the certification of the victory of Joe Biden, his Democratic opponent in the November 2020 presidential election.
On the day of the assault, Secret Service agents were alongside the former Republican president. Others were with Mike Pence, his vice president, who had gone into hiding in Congress following a call from supporters of Donald Trump to hang him.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi denied the accusations. He claimed officers’ phones were reset as part of a replacement program that began before the inspector general’s request, issued six weeks after the assault. He also confirmed that none of the messages that Joseph V. Cuffari was looking for had been lost during this migration.
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