Watchdog: Secret Service's text messages story has shifted several times

[swag]

Source: The Guardian

Hugo Lowell in Washington
Sat 16 Jul 2022 12.30 EDT

The Secret Service’s account about how text messages from the day before and the day of the Capitol attack were erased has shifted several times, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security told the House January 6 select committee at a briefing on Friday.

At one point, the explanation from the Secret Service for the lost texts was because of software upgrades, the inspector general told the panel, while at another point, the explanation was because of device replacements.

The inspector general also said that though the secret service opted to have his office do a review of the agency’s response to the Capitol attack in lieu of conducting after-action reports, it then stonewalled the review by slow-walking production of materials.

After the inspector general raised his complaints, he then discussed the feasibility of reconstructing the texts. But the issues so alarmed the select committee that the panel moved hours later to subpoena the Secret Service, according to participants at the briefing.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/16/secret-service-deleted-text-messages-january-6

[Irish_Dem]

1. Shifting stories means someone is lying.

[Mme. Defarge]

2. That's a heckuva lot bigger gap

than 18 1/2 minutes.

[Novara]

3. Oh, that's not suspicious at all, oh no.

If someone is telling the truth, their story remains fairly constant.

[Ford_Prefect]

4. Whoops!!! They did it Again! ..And Again! ...And?????

[peppertree]

7. The dog ate their messages!

Worth a try I guess.

[Lulu KC]

37. Laughing--n/t

[peppertree]

38. Why, thank you.

It is what it is.

[Miguelito Loveless]

5. Yet more obstruction of justice

That no on will be indicted for.

[peppertree]

6. They know NAZIng

[BumRushDaShow]

8. The J6 Committee may have to insert a NEW hearing before any "final/"primetime" one.

(the primetime one so far tentatively scheduled for 7/21/22)

I.e., call it "The Cover-up".



I know they are trying to be done with the hearings by August (when Congress is due to recess until after Labor Day), but the stuff keeps pouring in.

[erronis]

9. Frankly, for this American, I'd welcome as many hearings as necessary to finally lance this boil.

Getting to the root will require finding out who funded and aided/abetted all of these people.

Since the main goal of the J6C is to expose and document the crimes, I think we should continue on as long as it takes. I'm willing to give up many more hours of the rest of my life to enjoy watching those smug idiots get some justice.

[SoCalDavidS]

13. Better Hope We Can Somehow Retain Control Of House

Otherwise there's a ticking clock on these hearings.

[MiHale]

17. Agree.

Get the cancer out entirely otherwise it’ll grow back.

[BumRushDaShow]

19. I think the Committee has a defacto time limit to get a final report out

and obviously that would be before the November election, so depending on the election results - they at least have something "on the books". And if Democrats manage to hang on, then they could always continue with hearings in the regular Committees to be used for marking up legislation (which is one of the points of this exercise). Thompson is currently Chair of the House Homeland Security Commitee.

[erronis]

21. Agree. However I hope the J6C is not just focused on upcoming elections. This is historic.

Monumental.

Better the truth be published, no matter how late, than never.

Unless the future USA decides to eradicate history (possible, and has already been done sometimes), I'll get some satisfaction from a future historian (Gibbons-like) writing about what went wrong with this attempt at democracy/civilization.

(I'll bet they'll find capitalism at the core of the rot....)

[BumRushDaShow]

25. Well remember that DOJ is out there too

and I think that the J6 Committee has now started establishing a process to provide DOJ transcripts, videos, etc,, and other materials to them.

Doing steno/voice-to-text of thousands of witness interviews and then editing that for accuracy is going to be a HUGE job in any case and I expect that stuff (at least some of it initially) will be FOI-able and would have to be redacted (another project).

[gab13by13]

33. Yeah, sad, isn't it?

[BumRushDaShow]

34. Bannon's trial starts tomorrow

Steve Bannon heads to contempt trial for defying Jan. 6 committee. Here's a breakdown of his case.

Kevin Johnson
USA TODAY
Published 6:00 a.m. ET July 17, 2022


WASHINGTON – A federal judge had just dealt a series of blows to the defense case of former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who goes to trial this week for defying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack, when attorney David Schoen could not contain his frustration any longer. “What is the point of going to trial…if there are no defenses?” Schoen, Bannon's defense attorney, told U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols last week.

The attorney’s pessimistic assessment is a far cry from Bannon’s initial vow to aggressively challenge contempt charges and his threat to make the case the “misdemeanor from hell" for the government. “I'm never going to back down. We're going to go on offense,” Bannon told a scrum of reporters outside the federal courthouse after charges were leveled late last year. With jury selection set to begin Monday, the swagger Bannon and his defense team displayed months ago appears to have faded after a federal judge last week rejected multiple requests for a postponement, setting the stage for the flamboyant Donald Trump adviser's confrontation with the government.

What has Bannon been charged with and what is the penalty if convicted?

Bannon faces two counts of contempt for his refusal to appear for a deposition and another involving his refusal to produce documents, despite a subpoena from the House committee, which has held a series of hearings this summer featuring damning testimony from former Trump administration officials. Each count carries a minimum of 30 days and a maximum of one year in jail, as well as a maximum fine of $100,000.

The subpoena was issued last fall and the committee and full House voted to hold him in contempt. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in November. Attorney General Merrick Garland's decision to pursue the Bannon case represented a an escalation of the House panel's investigation and an important test for President Joe Biden's Justice Department and an attorney general who vowed to separate politics from a department roiled during the Trump administration by the former president's prior repeated intervention.

(snip)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/07/17/steve-bannon-contempt-trial-jan-6/10053758002/

And to quote LetMyPeopleVote - "This will be fun to watch".

Of course "DOJ Is Doing Nothing®".

[gab13by13]

35. There would be no Bannon trial without the select committee's involvement.

[BumRushDaShow]

36. Remember that Bannon, Flynn, and Stone had been pardoned

AFTER January 6 and none of them were actually working in the WH at the time the J6 Committee had been trying to get a response to the subpoena. The Committee subpoenaed him in September 2021 (along with others).

There was also a lawsuit that got filed by 45 at the time attempting to block the Committee for idiotic "privilege" claims, right before the vote for a referral for Contempt, which is what Bannon was attempting to claim for his reason for not complying.

And I will point you here - https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=2943971

The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who is responsible for coordinating ALL of the Capitol Insurrection cases, was an "Acting" (a Barr appointee) until Biden's pick was finally confirmed November 5, 2021, several weeks after the J6 Committee made their referral.

[wnylib]

26. US government needs a thorough cleanup,

from Congress to the Secret Service to the Supreme Court, DOJ, and the inner circle of the Trump administration.

[Backseat Driver]

16. There are at least two books already on pre-order at Amazon

having part of a title concerning the "J6 Report" due out Sept 13, 2022 - seems, as I've said before, the last line of each might have to be..."to be continued..." with an advertisement "Watch for Volume II coming soon." Neither claimed to contain a Blue-Ray compatible disc of televised portions, gavel to gavel.

[BumRushDaShow]

20. LOL

or you could download it from the J6 Committee website (and potentially through the Government Printing Office for a hard copy).

The September 13 date for issuance of the report sounds reasonable for aiming to get something out before the end of the FY (which is September 30).

[paleotn]

28. As things keep unraveling, we not see the "final" for a while....

That may have been the committee's play all along.

[LT Barclay]

10. They've had a bias for years.

I thought it was interesting that Clinton's affair was such a media frenzy, Kennedy's was fairly well known, but rumors of an affair by Bush Sr. lasted about one day and I don't believe it was because nothing happened.

[Ford_Prefect]

27. Certain members of the MSM are very well connected, and paid to lean right on such matters.

These days they will sadly do almost anything at all to get one clickable headline ahead of the competition, including fabricating material. Look at how they reacted to the story of the raped 10 year-old girl. How certain they were it was a hoax. How many million clicks did repeatedly manipulating the possibilities let them generate.


Now consider just how much she, her family and her doctors might be able to sue them for. With malice aforethought indeed.

[Mike Nelson]

11. Hmm...

... I guess we could call it a "shifty" story!

[SoCalDavidS]

12. They'll Be Held As Accountable As The Cops In Uvalde

Which is to say, NOT AT ALL.

[Evolve Dammit]

14. sounds right

[NQAS]

18. Exactly

No one will apologize. No one will be fired or punished in any way. Nothing will be done publicly and I doubt anything will be done behind closed doors. I’d hate to be a Democratic SS protectee right now. Wouldn’t trust any one of them.

Of course, no one is asking me, but I would put every single Secret Service agent on any protective detail on the polygraph immediately. I would do an in-depth social media search on all of them. Check bank accounts, political donations, to include all family members. Every single one.

Won’t happen.

[Slammer]

23. right on polygraphs

"Of course, no one is asking me, but I would put every single Secret Service agent on any protective detail on the polygraph immediately."

The average Secret Service agent on any protective detail probably hears more sensitive information than the average CIA spy in the field.

CIA employees are regularly put on the box. I think it's make sense to do the same to those Secret Service agents.

There's usually only 35-45 agents assigned to protective details at any point in time so it's not some monstrously huge undertaking to polygraph each of them several times a year.

I don't personally think polygraphs are all that effective in detecting lies. But they're great for intimidating certain government employees into being ethical when they otherwise might not be.

[PSPS]

15. The head of the SS is a trump appointee

[Slammer]

24. James Murray

He may be a Trump appointee to that particular job. But he has a hell of a resume'.

He was in charge of the DC field office during the Obama administration. They don't hand out that post in Cracker Jack boxes. And he wouldn't have gotten the job if he came across as some hyperpartisan Republican.

The only political donation I could find that might be from him to anyone was an $18 donation to Governor Hickenlooper (D) of Colorado in 2013. https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=james+murray

[Kid Berwyn]

22. Trumpypox

He infects everything he touches with corruption.

“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.”

https://theintercept.com/2022/07/14/jan-6-texts-deleted-secret-service/

What other agencies in the IC are infected?

[Orrex]

29. The dog ate them.

[Martin68]

30. This story is a BFD.

[keithbvadu2]

31. SS used to be known for integrity.

SS used to be known for integrity.

Not so much now.

[twodogsbarking]

32. She's only a friend.