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WaPo: Text messages for top Department of Homeland Security officials are also missing [1]

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Date: 2022-07-28

Former acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf

Text messages for the top two officials at the Department of Homeland Security are missing for a key period leading up the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, The Washington Post reported, citing four people briefed on the matter and internal emails.

The Department of Homeland Security notified the agency’s inspector general in late February that the text messages of acting Secretary Chad Wolf and deputy acting Secretary Ken Cuccinelli were lost in a “reset” of their government phones when they left their jobs in January 2021, according to an internal record obtained by the Project on Government Oversight and shared with The Washington Post.

The office of the department’s undersecretary of management also told the government watchdog that the text messages for its boss, undersecretary Randolph “Tex” Alles, the former Secret Service director, were also no longer available due to the phone reset.

The Post wrote:

This discovery of missing records for the senior-most homeland security officials, which has not been previously reported, increases the volume of potential evidence that has vanished regarding the time around the Capitol attack. It comes as both congressional and criminal investigators at the Department of Justice seek to piece together an effort by the president and his allies to overturn the results of the election, which culminated in a pro-Trump rally that became a violent riot in the halls of Congress. The office of Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari did not press the department leadership at that time to explain why they did not preserve these records, nor seek ways to recover the lost data, according to the four people briefed on the watchdog’s actions. Cuffari also failed to alert Congress to the potential destruction of government records. The revelation comes on the heels of the discovery that text messages of Secret Service agents — critical firsthand witnesses to the events leading up to Jan. 6 — were deleted more than a year ago and may never be recovered. .

So more evidence is missing that could have shed light on former President Donald Trump’s actions in the days leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection, particularly efforts to pressure DHS officials to support his claim that the 2020 election had been stolen and even to seize voting machines in several swing states won by Joe Biden.

“It is extremely troubling that the issue of deleted text messages related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol is not limited to the Secret Service, but also includes Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, who were running DHS at the time,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement, the Post reported.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/28/2113266/-WaPo-Text-messages-for-top-Department-of-Homeland-Security-officials-are-also-missing

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