Over the past few weeks, we’ve learned that text messages from former top political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the Department of Defense, and the Army were all deleted toward the end of the Trump administration — a process the various departments and agencies said was carried out through different data wipes and system migration projects.
Only time will tell…
Accountability and trust.
We either hold people in powerful positions like the Secret Service and Pentagon accountable to their obligations such as retaining records… or we assume they are liars and hiding behind a smoke screen… aka, no trust.
No trust in critical organizations is bad.
it seems more than a little convenient that none of their text exchanges from that period survived beyond Trump’s presidency.
Sort of like it was convenient that Dr Bruce Ivins didn’t survived beyond the Bush presidency
It begs the question: What were the Secret Service talking to each other about that day? Could text messages confirm her account?
The chances that the relevant USSS agents sent some ‘you won’t believe this sh*t’ texts confirming the incident is very high in my estimation.
Looks like a great starting list for some indictments to me.
Shouldn’t the messages from “non-key” personnel be checked to demonstrate whether this data wipe only caused disappearances in those who would have been positions to have incriminating evidence?
Time may change me
But you can’t trace time
Kash Patel, Miller’s former chief of staff, had an unusual route to the White House: Originally a federal public defender, he made a name for himself by helping Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) attempt to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
OK, so how does a federal public defender get involved with Nunes, who then catches the eye of DJT?
And from
Marc Ellis another Nunes associate:
Ellis, a former staffer to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), has played a key role in some of the controversies at the White House that arose when the President’s agenda collided with national security protocols. He reportedly was involved in the notorious “midnight run,” when Trump NSC officials, early on in the administration, provided to Nunes intelligence reports that Nunes claimed validated Trump’s false assertion that the Obama administration surveilled Trump Tower.
I’m going to need 3x5 index cards, colored string, and a frickin’ big ass bulletin board to map all these associates’ connections.
When it was just, I think, Secret Service initially with this whole ‘text wipe’ tech update stuff, I could almost credit the explanations. Routine maintenance, failure to back up data, etc., because it does happen in the real world. But given the number of entities/agencies/depts involved now, I don’t see how this can be a coincidence. And given the number of regs requiring maintenance of these kinds of documents (see, Presidential Records preservation act), I can’t imagine there isn’t at least a technical violation of some amount of regs and/or laws, or at least dept. policies here. If this were any other administration, the GOP would be howling non-stop about the massive cover-up and the beltway media would be publishing impeachment-curious op-eds against Biden.
Ezra Cohen-Watnick (along with Broidy and Barrack) is one of those highly suspicious characters who somehow keeps falling off the radar. IIRC, this guy supposed came out of nowhere and had no prior life (sure, yeah, right) before magically appearing in some mysterious way at DoD in some sort of intel capacity with access to the highest levels of classified information. We later learn he appeared to be passing that on to Devin Nunes (who proceeded to go talk about it at a press conference recorded on C-SPAN).
Who is Ezra Cohen-Watnick and when is someone going to investigate this guy???
I find it difficult to believe that there is no way to retrieve copies of these messages. Somebody has access to them.
HelpfulHint™: Start with a photo of puttie in the very middle, it’ll really streamline the whole connections map.
How far back are the messages deleted? Everyone is focusing on the insurrection, but it appears that everything prior to that time was also deleted. Was everything from the Trump administration lost?
Phones were wiped on turn-in. And then either passed to a new individual and thus over-written with new stuff, or turned in as excess and to be disposed of if older.
Unlikeliest thing would be actually sitting around in inventory somewhere, although could possibly get lucky.
And since the texts are normally just on the phone, nowhere else to retrieve them except if you get some recipient’s phone stuff.
I’m leaning more toward there being witnesses to a lot of this stuff. Human witnesses. That came out at the most recent J6 hearing as we learned others at the USSS observed a lot of what was going on and weren’t happy about what they were observing
I’ve always found texting to be troublesome and time consuming. Do SS agents regularly do it, like when they’re guarding someone or in the limo? The folks in the departmental offices, sure. It beats the information-rich technique we call “speech”.
As has been asked a few times in the past, aren’t there any IT types? Sysadmins, programmers, computer consultants who work for any of these departments? Have they been questioned? Are there backups?
And also, why aren’t there backups?
Apparently, the DHS policy is that individual employees are responsible for preserving their own relevant government records.
Obviously, such a dumb policy was massively not complied with. The question is whether it was malicious or incompetence.
The USSS had to give explicit directions to DoorDash for their Starbucks and pizzas for prompt delivery in the capitol during the riot. I can just see that…/s