TWGB: The 'Keeping Secrets" Service? 2 UPDATED

 

PURGED — Here’s the news. ⁦Those @SecretService⁩ texts are gone, gone, gone . Agency scoured records and said it found nothing new to give Congress . National Archives now investigating if USSS broke the law https://t.co/ROMnhjXSf5

— Carol Leonnig (@CarolLeonnig) July 19, 2022

If these texts are "gone, gone, gone" then obviously, that sounds very deliberate and obviously sketchy as hell--that's destruction of official records, it's obstuction of justice, and it's really, really bad. It reminds me of the destroyed CIA torture tape or the Nixon's missing 18 1/2 minutes. The cover-up looks bad, but those texts must have been really bad. I don't think they are just covering uo for Trump-and I think there will need to be some housecleaning at the Secret Service.

UPDATE: The migration took place while Secret Service was aware that these texts were being sought:

 

Congress informed the Secret Service it needed to preserve and produce documents related to January 6 on January 16, 2021, and again on January 25, 2021, for four different committees who were investigating what happened, according to the source. The Secret Service migration did not start until the January 27, 2021. 

"Nobody along the way stopped and thought, well, maybe we shouldn't do the migration of data and of the devices until we are able to fulfill these four requests from Congress," said Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida, a committee member, in an interview on MSNBC. "The process as explained to us was simply to leave it to the agent to determine whether or not there was anything on their phones worth saving that was necessary to save for federal records." 

Separately, a source familiar with the matter told CNN that employees were instructed twice to back up their phones.

Compliance with backing up the data was left to the agents.  

UPDATE: This is a criminal inquiry now, because everyone is paying attention now, but I think people realized this was seriously funky probably beforehand because HOW DON'T YOU? Which means the Secret Service will not be investigating themselves about the things they did to not memorialize other things. Also too, this is probably late enough to the game that considerable information is actually scuppered. But the people whose information is specifically missing is specifically interesting. And other inquiries regarding personal comms etc. could certainly prove interesting.