These missing text messages from January 6th and January 7th kinda remind me of the Nixon tapes with missing pieces of dialog in the Oval Office.
Nixon’s peoples explained the gaps as an unintentional blunder by his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, while transcribing the tapes. The recorder was operated by foot pedals, and she supposedly got the pedals mixed up when she tried to answer phone calls.
These accidentally-erased text messages…will the excuse be along the lines of “the dog ate my homework?”
Of course the difference is that Rose Mary Woods was a loyal and devoted staff member “inside” the administration. The personal secretary is supposed to be loyal and devout-- to be willing to cover a little bit for her beloved boss.
This time however – the suspiciously devout sycophants are members of a completely separate government agency that has a very strong reason to remain professional and objective. While loyalty by the Secret Service is not a bad thing — lying to cover for a criminal who you are supposed to be keeping alive is quite a step beyond a little in house cover-up.
Now there is a whole government agency with a tarnished reputation and quite a bit of explaining to do. Assuming this is not a legitimate screw-up (which seems laughingly unlikely), this is a huge failure of integrity, professionalism, judgement, and many other “eulogy virtues” for the agents – and probably illegal as well. But the agency itself will also suffer, and may be institutionally guilty as well.
Like everything else about Trump’s crimes – they are similar to Nixon’s except SO MUCH worse in every possible way.
Accordion, pardon me, according to CNN:
“Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari knew about the deleted Secret Service texts for more than a year before he told the January 6 committee about them.”