The information we’ve learned about Donald Trump, his team, their efforts to overturn the election, and the Jan. 6 attack has been devastating. But it’s hard not to wonder how much worse the emerging picture would appear if some key details weren’t “missing.”
For example, Secret Service text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 have apparently been erased under controversial circumstances that are now the subject of a criminal investigation. There are also questions surrounding gaps in the White House call logs.
At last week’s Jan. 6 committee hearing, we learned the Presidential Daily Diary also “contains no information from the period between 1:21 p.m. and 4:03 p.m.” the day of the assault on the Capitol.
One of my personal favorites was the reporting on then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows literally setting fire to papers in his office after a meeting with a Republican congressman who was assisting with Team Trump’s anti-election schemes.
Overnight, the list received an important new addition. The Washington Post reported:
Text messages for President Donald Trump’s acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli are missing for a key period leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to four people briefed on the matter and internal emails.
According to the reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari was notified in February that Wolf’s and Cuccinelli’s text messages were lost in a “reset” of their government phones.
The Post added that the DHS watchdog “did not press the department leadership at that time to explain why they did not preserve these records, nor seek ways to recover the lost data.” He also failed to notify Congress.
There’s a reason key congressional Democrats do not have confidence in the Trump-appointed inspector general — and do not want him involved in key elements of the larger investigation.
In case this isn’t obvious, Wolf was already a controversial figure who was accused of politicizing his office. (It’s also worth emphasizing that while Trump appointed Wolf to serve as acting DHS secretary in November 2019, there’s ample reason to believe he served in the post illegally.) Meanwhile, Cuccinelli — who was a little too extreme to get confirmed by a Republican-led Senate, but whom the then-president appointed to a top DHS post anyway — was even more brazen about trying to push officials into pursuing a partisan agenda in line with the Trump White House’s wishes. The Post’s report added, “The telephone and text communications of Wolf and Cuccinelli in the days leading up to Jan. 6 could have shed considerable light on Trump’s actions and plans. In the weeks before the attack on the Capitol, Trump had been pressuring both men to help him claim the 2020 election results were rigged and even to seize voting machines in key swing states to try to ‘re-run’ the election.” It’s these guys’ texts from the runup to Jan. 6 that are now missing. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chair of the Jan. 6 committee, said in a written statement, “It is extremely troubling that the issue of deleted text messages related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol is not limited to the Secret Service, but also includes Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, who were running DHS at the time.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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