Pence will never do that. Not a chance. Not even. No.
If you think I’m hoping that the answer is that the secret service is just another failed American institution,you’re mistaken, but it totally is. They were enthusiastic participants in the coup.
“ He knew exactly what this inside coup they had planned for was going to do,” Raskin said, adding: “It was a coup directed by the president against the vice president and against the Congress.
If we assume that the SS is telling the truth here, and that they have not retained any of these texts, I wonder how many could still be recovered from any recipients outside the SS. If DOJ, or the DHS IG, or whoever investigates, could get metadata from the service provider(s), it seems like there might be contacts outside the SS from whom texts (or at least pieces of texts) might still be recoverable.
It would take a lot of legwork, a lot of subpoenas, and a lot of time in court, but it would be interesting to see how much could be reconstructed.
Hopefully things are a lot easier and there’s someone within the organization that actually saved some stuff and is willing to provide it to investigators. Failing that (well, in addition to that), I want to see some important heads roll. If even half of what Carol Loennig has written about the state of the agency is true, they need a major, major overhaul. Maybe this is the thing that tips the scales toward reform.
More on the SS on January 6:
On January 6th, his Secret Service detail wanted to drive him off the Capitol grounds and he refused saying to his top agent Tim Giebels, “I’m not getting in the car, Tim. I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.” The book goes on to describe the man in charge of the Secret Service’s movements telling Pence’s national security adviser, Gen. Keith Kellogg, they planned to move Pence to Joint Base Andrews. Kellogg told him not to do it saying, “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.”
There are a number of ways to interpret that but MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace said on Thursday, “someone familiar with this reporting tells me that Pence feared a conspiracy. He feared that the Secret Service would aid Trump in his ultimate aims that day.”
Considering everything that had been going on, all of which Pence was no doubt aware, that would not have been a ridiculous suspicion. After all, if they could have gotten Pence out of town they would have thwarted the certification of the electoral college vote at least for that day. Who knows what would have followed? (And what does this say about the Secret Service?)
I am having a hard time accepting the idea that these messages are gone forever. The prisons are full of people who thought “delete” actually meant “delete.”
I think this is off-base, because I agree with the implication of Buck_Godot’s comment above — the messages they’re interested in are the ones that were received, not anything that was sent. Secret Service opsec would prohibit agents exchanging anything mission-specific via this channel (it would be both inefficient and potentially insecure), and given the chaos of those days it’s unlikely that agents would be exchanging personal texts with one another on official phones. Rather, it seems much more plausible to me that the civilians in the White House, with their loosey-goosey approach to protocol, would be sending messages directly to the agents.*
It’s entirely possible that the agents were getting contradictory directives from WH personnel: “Trump wants to go to the Capitol, you have to make that happen,” vs “under no circumstances let him anywhere near Congress.” Either of these would be politically explosive and probably criminally probative. If both were happening, that’s evidence of a chaotic WH with internal disagreement, and Trump’s choice of a side goes a long way toward demonstrating his intent.
It should be noted that in this scenario it isn’t necessary to ascribe malign motives to the Secret Service in deleting the messages. It may not be a conscious effort to shield Trump, for example. They have always been assiduous about maintaining the perception that their organization is above politics, that they defend whomever is in office and take no sides. In this situation, if Trump’s people were putting their criminal conspiracy in writing, it could drag the SS into something they want no part of. They could be forced to become witnesses for a future prosecution, or at the very least, attention will be called to the fact that their agents were silent observers of overt criminality. That could cause questions to be raised as to the proper role of the Service: do we really want them to stand passively by while insurrection is planned in front of them? The super-Trumpy agents on the ground will obviously want their role obscured, but even a truly benign neutral leadership will be loath to see the overall agency stained. So there may have been a deeply misguided but still understandable impulse on the part of those leaders to try to disentangle the agency from the political kerfuffle in which they were embedded, by “losing” the evidence of the conspiratorial panic that was sloshing over onto them.
*Meadows did already share some messages with the committee, but his disclosure was incomplete. The committee would obviously like to cross-reference his messages with the SS record, looking for aligned gaps.
Then why do they have 800,000 other text messages, from the surrounding days, that just happened to not get deleted?
God, this cover-up is so ham-handed, I’m beginning to question the reputation of the Secret Service as an “elite” organization.
I have. The evidence I’ve seen is that they’re deliberately (attempting to) hide and destroy evidence of what happened on that day, counter to policy. That’s evidence that they were involved in something that they don’t want coming to light, and the coup is the most obvious possibility.
And if the Secret Service is trying to claim that these texts never existed, well, that’ll be easily disproved by the phone company records.
Staying “above politics” would mean cooperating truthfully with other law-enforcement agencies: Refuse to offer speculation on what others “meant” or “intended” or the like, but offer up things like texts verbatim on request. Withholding simple factual information like this, though, is taking sides and politicizing themselves.
This seems to be the case. There’s a statement from the USSS that said they are unaware of any text messages issued by Secret Service employees that would fall under the information request.
That strikes me as an awfully cagey response. And it looks like the “don’t worry, we’ll cooperate” messaging from them isn’t flying with anybody on the basis of what they’ve provided.
It’s Pence I’m most disappointed in at this point. He’s a religious nutjob, but he’s part of the establishment. He should have the courage to say, publicly, whether his concern was the coup, or being unable to fulfill his duties due to good-faith efforts to protect him.
It matters, and Pence’s unwillingness to just tell us indicts his character.
All I can think of wrt this chapter of this horrifying saga is Trump’s implicit credo: Act With Impunity.
ISTM that this is the USSS’s turn at saying, “Yeah. We did it. So what ?”
But what if we … didn’t ?
He’s trying to have it both ways, appeal to the fascists, but not be a fascist.
This is it. If they’re hiding something, they are politicized.
Cell service providers typically keep records of texts for a short time. Texts from a year and a half ago most likely are gone forever.
In order to get a record of texts from your carrier, you will probably need to jump through a bunch of hoops to prove your identity or even get permission from the other person you were texting. And most carriers only keep records of SMS messages for a limited time—you’re not likely to ever be able to recover a message from a year ago.
I suspect you’re referring to standard deletion of files from a computer hard drive, which has nothing to do with this subject.
Maybe I’ve seen too many mafia movies and conspiracy thrillers, but I keep thinking that Pence avoided being killed by staying at the Capitol. There’s an old saying, “never let them take you to a second location,” with the implication being that the second location is where you die. The Secret Service moved Pence to the loading dock, but it’s not hard to imagine a zealot Trump fan among them who would have tried to assassinate the VP. Especially if he thinks that Trump told him to.
So you’re saying Pence avoided being Tessio?
And is going to stay in power and can pardon him.
Since Abe Vigoda was 20 years younger than Pence when The Godfather came out, yet looked 40 years older than Mike Pence looks now, I’d say he managed to avoid being “Tessio-ed” twice.
The plan appears to be to get Pence in the car, whisk him to “safety” before he could certify the results and then declare Trump the winner. Also, the SS deleted the texts almost immediately after the attempted coup. Quote:
The Secret Service has disputed that, saying in a statement that data on some phones were lost as part of a pre-planned “system migration” in January 2021, and that Cuffari’s initial request for communications came weeks later in late February 2021.
But the select committee questioned the Secret Service’s emphasis on that date, the participants said, and noted in the subpoena letter that the request for electronic communications in fact first came from Congress, ten days after the Capitol attack.
I worked for a state government agency , and back in around 2015 the governor introduced a new policy - all emails would be deleted after 90 days unless the employee moved them to a special “retention” folder. It didn’t last for very long- but that “set” period can be short. We had to retain emails related to litigation - but who knows whether there will be litigation within 90 days of the email being sent? Which is what a lot of people thought was the reason behind this policy - if you auto delete emails after 90 days , you won’t typically have destroyed emails that you knew were relevant to some sort of legal proceeding. You will have destroyed them before there was a reason to retain them.