There’s something very wrong with the U.S. Secret Service, Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger said on Monday. And his suspicions are not unfunded.
In mid-July, Joseph Cuffari, the Trump-appointed inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, sent a letter to Congress informing them that text messages sent by agents on and before January 6 had been erased. A spokesperson for the Secret Service claimed that this was part of a long-planned “system migration.” But the erasures have now spurred a criminal investigation after investigators could find only a single relevant text message from two dozen agents subject to a congressional subpoena.
But it is not only the filed agents’ phones that got wiped clean. According to The Washington Post, the messages during this period were erased for the two top officials at the Department of Homeland Security at the time as well. Text messages for Chad Wolf, the acting homeland security secretary, and Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary, “are missing for a key period leading up to the January 6 attack,” the newspaper reported.
Kinzinger on Monday suggested that members of the agency may have engaged in misconduct in the run-up to the January 6 attack and tried to hide it afterwards.
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During an interview on CNN on Monday, Kinzinger recalled a 1 January 2021 conversation with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in which he voiced concerns that there would be violence on the day Congress was set to certify Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. He said the California Republican “dismissed” him and said the threats of violence emanating from pro-Trump circles were merely “overheated rhetoric”.
The Illinois congressman said he has concerns about the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies ignoring similar reports of possible violence.
“I’m concerned that maybe they saw this intelligence that there was going to be potential violence, that there was going to be an attack, and they dismissed it because these are Donald Trump’s people, they would never do anything like this,” he told CNN.
Asked about plans to recall Secret Service personnel who were close to Trump before and on January 6, Kinzinger said it was not his place whether to say any agents lied in prior statements to the select committee.
“There are some inconsistencies that we’re going to pursue. There are a lot of questions, things they said earlier that maybe witnesses have countered,” he said, adding that “there is something going on” at the agency.
“There is something going on at the Secret Service, either pure incompetence, all the way on the scale to potentially very criminal activity or — or just having a preference for one side or the other,” he concluded.
Watch the segment below from CNN.
