The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
ANALYSIS – Imagine how damaging it would be for the national security of the United States, for public confidence in American institutions, not to mention how embarrassing for the Secret Service, if text messages emerged revealing a plan by agents loyal to “Mogul,” the agency code name for President Donald Trump, to kidnap “Hoosier,” the code name for Vice President Mike Pence, on January 6, 2021.
What if the texts indicate a plan to grab Pence and take him to a secret secure location where he could not reconvene the Senate and go on with the counting of Electoral College votes certifying Joe Biden as president that day?
That is the clear indication of what’s going on here according to the first breaking news story in this saga reported first by The Intercept.
When rioters entered the building, the Secret Service tried to whisk Pence away from the scene.
“I’m not getting in the car,” Pence reportedly told the Secret Service detail on January 6. “If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off.”
Had Pence entered the vice presidential limo, he would have been taken to a secure location where he would have been unable to certify the presidential election results, plunging the U.S. into uncharted waters.
“People need to understand that if Pence had listened to the Secret Service and fled the Capitol, this could have turned out a whole lot worse,” a congressional official not authorized to speak publicly told The Intercept. “It could’ve been a successful coup, not just an attempted one.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the January 6 committee, called Pence’s terse refusal — “I’m not getting in the car” — the “six most chilling words of this entire thing I’ve seen so far.”
So it is a bit of a mystery why, when the Washington bureau of The New York Times also obtained a copy of the letter from the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, the national newspaper of record did not focus on that angle and framing of the story.
Secret Service Text Messages Around Jan. 6 Were Erased, Inspector General Says
WASHINGTON — Text messages sent and received by Secret Service agents around the time of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol last year have been erased, an inspector general said on Thursday, prompting concern from the House committee investigating the assault.
In a letter obtained by The New York Times, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of the Secret Service, reported that many of the agents’ texts were erased as part of a device replacement program even after the inspector general had requested them as part of his inquiry into the events of Jan. 6.
Then it is also a mystery why, when the Editorial Board of The Washington Post got around to taking a stand on getting to the bottom of this scandal, they were so totally flippant in their reporting and writing. Is this a joke to the Jeff Bezos Washington Post? A mere parlor game for Washington ‘Deep State’ insiders?
The Secret Service texting scandal demands answers
Maybe the Secret Service is incompetent, or maybe there’s something even fouler afoot. Either way, the scandal over the disappearance of text messages around the Jan. 6 insurrection demands answers.
A strange story has unspooled this month about the apparent deletion of communications sent by agents around the time of the attack on the U.S. Capitol — and each new detail seems to lead us further from a resolution. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General says the Secret Service erased messages from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, after it requested them; the Secret Service says the messages were permanently purged as part of an agency wide phone reset and replacement planned months earlier. The Secret Service is now under criminal investigation by the OIG. The OIG, in turn, is itself under investigation by the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency for undisclosed allegations of misconduct.
These events raise a mess of questions. Most important, how on earth did the Secret Service lose track of these texts? IT migrations are easy enough in 2022 that most small businesses can do them without a snag. It boggles the mind that a supposedly advanced cyber-actor like the Secret Service, required by law to preserve this sort of data, would fail to back up information as a matter of course.
That the agency would lose information so obviously important to the historical record is even more perplexing. And why did DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, an appointee of the previous administration, choose to alert Congress to the texts’ deletion only now, months after his office discovered they were gone? Finally, there’s the worry that the jurisdictional snarl created by the OIG’s investigation of the Secret Service will complicate efforts by the Jan. 6 House select committee to find answers of its own.
That the facts of this mysterious matter do eventually make their way to the public is essential. Congress was looking for these communications for a reason: The discussions among Secret Service agents before, during and after rioters stormed the chambers of Congress surely weren’t restricted to the radio conversations of which we heard snippets during Thursday night’s hearing. The real-time actions and reactions of those so close to President Donald Trump as he planned whether to go to the Capitol, and what to do there, can speak to his intentions and his state of mind — proving crucial to any possible case against him.
It’s encouraging that the DHS inspector general seems to want to get to the bottom of this matter now, at this bizarrely belated stage. But Congress, the Justice Department and anyone else paying attention should also keep watch, including over the watchdog.
Journalism as a Joke
Look, I understand that this entire news-journalism thing has become a total joke of late, simply a vehicle for social media clickbait to get traffic to a web interface with an advertising and subscription interface for millionaires and billionaires to make more money. These are the capitalist “b-b-b-b-bas-tuds” to quote Sugar Boy from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men novel set in the time of Huey Long of Louisiana, another dictator-king wannabe.
Even the newspaper publishers were in on the gambit then, and of course this business of producing “short, snappy, funny” news copy about politics has long been a staple of the mass circulation daily newspapers.
At least Willie Stark’s intentions started out pure, as did Huey Long’s, to build farm-to-market roads for poor rural farmers and schools and hospitals for the poor.
It’s not clear that Trump ever had a sympathetic thought for the poor “losers and suckers” he asked to give him money and their votes. There is no redeeming quality to reveal in this story. It would not even work as fiction. It’s simply unabashed greed, narcissism and the selfish gene run amok for all to see, only half the people appear as blind as cave dwelling bats.
They are like the people in the alleged time of Jesus, who did not have “ears to hear” what they were being told.
Just like the prophets predicted, they all went along with the antichrist, believing he was the savior of their race and class.
Another Possibility
It’s also possible that the texts could reveal a different loyalty among some of the agents on duty that day, agents who were not on Trump’s side, and instead stood up for the Constitution like many of the Capitol Police and Metro Police and National Guard troops who showed up and stood up to defend the Capitol against Trump’s insurrectionists.
Clearly there were many cops and troops on Trump’s side that day, and not just members of the right-wing Oath Keepers. That included Capitol Police officer Michael A. Riley, 50, who was indicted in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on two counts of obstruction of justice for aiding and communicating with right-wing domestic terrorists involved in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and for destroying related evidence.
It also included Capitol Police Lt. Tarik Khalid Johnson, who was recorded in a video wearing a MAGA cap and removing barricades on the Capitol grounds and inviting Trump’s insurrectionists in.
It also includes Trump’s acting Secretary of Defense, Christopher C. Miller, who clearly played his own role in delaying the deployment of the National Guard to help that day, all of which has previously been reported.
It included both the House and Senate Sargents at Arms, who both resigned immediately after the coup attempt failed on the demand of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for at the very least their “failure” to secure the Capitol that day.
None of this has been the focus of the televised investigation by the House Select Committee.
At times there have been radio communications played, but those recordings were from the D.C. Metro Police, not the Capitol Police. Previous stories revealed that the Capitol Police radio communications are classified as “top secret” and not subject to information requests under the Freedom of Information Act of 1967.
Three sources told me in the first few days after the attack that two Capitol Police officers both heard a “stand down” order come over the Capitol Police radio about the time the insurrectionists were reaching the doors of the building. In spite of assurances from my sources, who said this information would surely “come out and be revealed in the investigation,” it has not been confirmed so far, although evidence in testimony from a high level aide to Donald Trump’s last chief of staff as president who was in the room confirmed that Trump ordered the entire security infrastructure of Washington and the United States Capitol building to “stand down” on Jan. 6.
Trump Ordered Washington Security to ‘Stand Down’ on Jan. 6, according to Sworn Testimony
If the Secret Service messages were in fact totally deleted, and wiped from all devices, we may never know what they might have revealed.
The committee has displayed an interest in taking the deposition of Anthony M. Ornato, who Trump hand picked and elevated to deputy White House chief of staff. He was a Secret Service agent. This is highly unusual. No doubt Trump conducted interviews with all the agents covering him, to make sure of their “loyalty” to him, not just the government and the Constitution.
Ornato has already tried to dispute the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide who testified that a top White House official told her Trump had become enraged when his security detail refused to take him to the Capitol.
I’m not hearing from my sources, yet, on what exactly was on the deleted texts. But it is possible to make an educated guess, what is called a hypothesis in science. This much should be clear: There is no way this guy Ornato should be trusted. If Trump picked him, it was because he was a Trump loyalist.
Someone from the Secret Service who is loyal to the Constitution should come forward and reveal to the committee and the American people what really happened that day.
We will never really know what role the Secret Service played in the Kennedy assassination on Friday, November 22, 1963 in Dallas. But an author can draw certain conclusions by looking closely at all the evidence.
The Secret Service: The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency
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