What Did The Secret Service Know...?

As the House Select Committee investigation the January 6 Insurrection offers a - for now - final presentation about donald trump's refusal to stop the riot he started, one major development in their ongoing pursuit of the facts is how the Presidential security detail - aka The Secret Service - deleted text messages from their phones when they shouldn't have (via Paul Rosenzweig at the Atlantic (paywall)):

The United States Secret Service is reported to have permanently deleted or lost a host of data, including text messages, that relate to the January 6 insurrection. The Secret Service says that the deletions came about as part of a routine, long-planned update to its phone system and that, as part of this update, it factory-reset its agents’ mobile devices, deleting all data. Skeptical observers suspect a cover-up of the agency’s errors, and more apocalyptic critics see the data deletion as part of a possible conspiracy to support President Donald Trump’s attempted coup. The entire episode is now under criminal investigation by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general...

Those texts, like emails, are considered government records, and there's supposed to be procedures in place to secure them for review by the proper authorities (National Archives) before anything else happens to them:

Secret Service officials told The Washington Post that the deletions were not malicious—that they were simply part of a phone-system update. But best practice today for any system update is for the new system to be backward-compatible with older systems. Nobody who isn’t trying to conceal something wants to lose message history—not for messages about January 6 and not for more mundane ones about, say, procurement or leave approval. Migrating without the capacity to roll back is simply unheard-of these days.

Furthermore, why did the planned migration continue after the Secret Service received a data-retention notice from Congress on January 16? Was that notice not transmitted to the IT department? Were the Secret Service’s lawyers unaware of the retention notice—to say nothing of the agency’s obligations under federal law to preserve records for the National Archives...?

The entire situation reeks of coverup and obstruction. The timing of this move is questionable at best. And the people involved in the decision-making at the White House and Secret Service agency happen to have every reason to make those text messages disappear (via Amanda Carpenter at The Bulwark):

One person Hutchinson testified communicating with at length is shaping up to become a central figure in the investigation—and his involvement raises further troubling questions about the Secret Service.

Tony Ornato is a Secret Service agent who, in a highly unusual move, left his position leading Trump’s security detail to serve as Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff for operations. In that post, he oversaw the Secret Service—the agency that had employed him and to which he has since returned. He is now the assistant director of the Secret Service Office of Training.

The fact that a Secret Service agent who left the agency to work for one president as a high-ranking official in the service of his administration—effectively leaving the civil service to become a political appointee—was then allowed to just slide back into the Secret Service under the next president of another party raises obvious questions about potential political bias in the agency...

Ornato was a person in close personal contact with trump through much of trump's tenure as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice). This was someone likely prone to accede to trump's demands regardless of the legality. At another point in the narrative coming from Carol Leonnig (author of the must-read Zero Fail book detailing the modern corruption within the Secret Service itself), she documents a confrontation between Ornato and another senior official about what was happening with Vice President Pence's security situation on January 6th as the rioters swarmed the Capitol building:

Around this time, (National Security Advisor Keith) Kellogg ran into Tony Ornato in the West Wing. Ornato, who oversaw Secret Service movements, told him that Pence’s detail was planning to move the vice president to Joint Base Andrews.

“You can’t do that, Tony,” Kellogg said. “Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it...”

While Ornato claims that conversation didn't happen, and Kellogg testified favorably about Ornato to the Committee, that little moment plays into the skeptics' accusations that the Secret Service was about to spirit Pence away from Congress in an attempt to sabotage the Electoral Count certification.

This part of the Insurrection plot would have been where - as trump failed to convince Pence to overturn the Electoral Count - the riot would force Pence to flee before certification could be done. Senator Chuck Grassley, as Senate Pro Tempore (backup leader of the Senate based on age/seniority), had promised the day before he would step in for Pence and accept the fake Electors trump and his handlers were trying to submit for certain states to flip the Electoral Count his way.

If trump couldn't get Pence to do him the big favor, Grassley sure as hell would.

Stories abound about how - at the point where VP Pence's Secret Service agents were encouraging him to jump into a limo and drive to safety - Pence refused to let his guards escort him away from a genuine threat rioting just on the other side of the Capitol building wall from himself, implying he knew full well if he did that he was pretty much kidnapped. "I trust you, but I know you're not the one behind the wheel."

The missing Secret Service texts would likely have revealed communications between the agents back at the White House following trump's orders and the agents at the Hill trying to protect Pence. At the best, those messages would have exposed trump's demands to get Pence to either play ball or make way for someone who would. At worst, those messages might have exposed more violent threats from trump to Pence. We may not know, if those texts are indeed long gone.

Either way, whatever was on those text messages were more damaging to trump's situation than whatever punishments - destroying evidence and committing obstruction - that the Secret Service agents involved could live with.

The sad thing about the Secret Service: They're supposed to do the right thing. They're hired to protect people, they're trained to go against the instinct of self-preservation, they're drilled into the noble idea of taking a bullet for the President (and the President's Family, and anyone else assigned to their care).

But this is how corrupt the agency has become. It's not that they're taking a bullet for donald trump: It's that they're committing crimes like obstruction, and covering up the possibility they were going to commit other crimes against Pence (someone else who deserved their protection).

This is how corrupting an influence donald trump has been. However bent the Secret Service was - again, go read Zero Fail - before trump entered the White House in 2017, when he left in 2021 the Secret Service was completely broken.

Gods help our Executive Branch. Not President Biden, not Vice President Harris, not their families and not anybody else that the Secret Service is supposed to protect. 

The guards can no longer be trusted.