I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that within 2 days after January 6, the Secret Service, Homeland Security, and Pentagon officers all conveniently had their texts and emails purged. Wonder if that’s because they were aware of or sympathized with attempted coup, or just covering their a$$ to avoid prosecution? thoughts?
No knowledgeable person I’ve heard discussing this believes it was some random happenstance. Lots of hallmarks of a coordinated conspiracy.
I’ve no doubt the DOJ has been aware of it for some time and even without any referral, is conducting investigations of the scheme. Because you know, they don’t have anything else on at the moment.
I suspect the removal of these materials was coordinated by the top people in those agencies who were Trump appointees. If so, it is of major concern just how deep this corruption goes – and if it continues into the present day. I suspect it does, meaning lots of pushback against those who are investigating.
Maintaining official records is taken very seriously as a requirement of responsible governance (“Buttery males!!”). Penalties for willfully destroying such records can be severe.
It is going to take some time to investigate, though. One obvious problem with investigating conspiracies to destroy records is… there are no records.
Translation → But her emails.
Took me a second
Sorry. Thanks. I shouldn’t assume everyone is familiar with that term.
but what surprised me is when media reports stated that data was “lost”–I thought deleted data can be recovered from phones and computers>
The media can’t be in the position of characterizing the materials as deliberately deleted, so of course they will use the term, “lost,” unless and until there is a legal determination that the records were deliberately destroyed. That’s my understanding re their choice of the term – even if it may end up being wholly misleading in the end.
If the materials can’t be recovered from phones and/or computers, then that does throw a whole lot more suspicion on the “lost” narrative. My (admittedly insufficient) understanding is, you have to work really hard to eliminate all traces of such communications.
If you ever research how to safely delete data, all of the research that form the basis for the advice on how to do it comes from the US government.
At a simple level, most computers delete stuff by simply marking the information as expendable. When it needs to make a new file, it can reuse that freed up space for the new info (destroying the old info). It’s like a store that’s gone bust. It ain’t working no more but, looking in the window, to you might still see some junk lying around until someone new comes in to take over the space.
In the world of digital storage, though, there are even more complex retrieval methods, though, than going and looking through the windows of defunct shops.
But suffice it to say that the DoD and the Secret Service almost certainly know how to do all of this properly so that not even the NSA should be able to restore the info.
That said:
- We don’t know if they went through the full “nuking it from outer space” level of secure deletion. Plausibly, they used a cheaper and easier method that’s recoverable.
- Plausibly, someone might have purposefully done a bad job to preserve information.
- Plausibly, Biden would authorize the NSA to use their must advanced retrieval tools. (See #1)
- Plausibly there were duplicates somewhere and those were destroyed in a less than perfect way. (See #1 and #3)
So it’s not impossible that this stuff will come out. But if there is someone who can and would destroy it in the most effective way, it would be groups like the DoD and Secret Service.
IANAL:
Does spoliation of evidence figure into this at all? (The legal premise that if you destroyed evidence the court can assume the worst for you that the evidence may have provided).
The definition linked above suggests this only happens if the party has been told to retain that evidence but I’d think government record keeping laws can be a stand-in for this.
I’m not sure about timeline, but my understanding is House committee subpoenaed records and then was told they were “purged”
I would think that the Secret Service has there own proprietary communication systems. How does that work, does it go over Verizon or T-Mobile or whomever?
Yeah away from DC it would probably have to, but in DC guarding the President of the US, they must have their own system that they can control.
Yes, please don’t drop such nonsense in a post and expect everyone to understand. I certainly did not.
If their devices have encrypted storage - and I would hope they do at that level of government - it might be difficult or impossible to recover deleted data. Anything they recover would be useless garbage.
I like Biden, but I think he failed in one aspect of his job. On day 1, maybe immediately after being sworn in, he should have fired every single person that DJT appointed. After that, fire the appointees of those appointees. And after that, the third generation of appointees. Once you are in Donald’s orbit, you are forever corrupted. The DHS IG showed no good faith in preserving the evidence that was needed for investigating 1/6. Ditto the hammerheads in DOD and DOJ.
I don’t think he can fire the head of the Postal Service. And if he fires them, getting new people for those jobs might be a slog that would take up precious time. I agree in spirit, however.
But could he have fired the DHS IG? If he could have, he should have.
I think you have to know they did something wrong before you can fire them. Biden was never the guy who was going to take office and peremptorily fire lots of people without cause. In the cases of Secret Service, DHS and the Pentagon, it took awhile for the corruption to become apparent.
It’s hard to remember the state of the country at that time, but so much of this corruption was still out of sight. Trump was in office until January 20th and Biden’s team was not permitted to interact with any Trump people. No one had subpoenaed any records to learn they were missing. It would have been difficult for Biden to allege wrongdoing against a lot of these people in that time frame.
I do remember learning that the Secret Service team that guarded Trump were reshuffled and new teams brought in for Biden and his family. So Biden had likely heard about some of the corruption at that level early on.
I believe that former VPs still get Secret Service protection. I would expect that they were gossiping about all the craziness happening in the White House and in the service itself.
Also, in the first days in the White House he was still trying to unite and bring together. It was not so obvious that Trump would not go away and disappear from sight. Firing a whole bunch of the former guy’s people would not have been the very best way to demonstrate he was willing to be open minded and accepting.
Biden did spend his first day signing Executive Orders undoing just about everything Trump had done by EO. But he was trying to sell the idea that even if you had followed and supported the last guy you could be a part of our new government going forward to. But they didn’t want that to happen and eventually Biden said fine and quit trying to those who were carrying daggers for the other guy.
It’s customary, in government service, that if you are a presidential appointee - the type of office that requires Senate approval - you turn in a resignation letter at the start of a new president’s term of office. If the president accepts the letter, the next one up becomes the acting occupant of that office - often this will be a career civil servant. Outgoing administrations will often seek to “embed” their appointees into civil service positions - they have to go through the selection process, testing, etc. - so that they will continue in the bureaucracy after the president is gone. At times, they will seek to embed into positions which will assume the acting duties of appointees that will resign with the change of administration.
In any case, for a president to accept a resignation, they will want to be really sure that the new acting occupant will be better than the one resigning. In many cases, this is not a high bar to clear, but sometimes care is required. Also, it should be noted that the president can accept the resignation proffered at any time; this can keep the prior occupant on a somewhat short leash while the President’s team is getting put together.
The Postal Service is a special case, as the Postmaster General reports to a board of presidential appointees, which have the power to hire or fire in that position.