1/6 Insurrection Investigation

[Rick Plant]

Nevada Senate candidate's spox marched with Oath Keepers to the Capitol on J6



CNN Kfile "scoop team" on Tuesday released bombshell conclusions it came to after an extensive examination of Jan. 6 video.

"The new communications director for the Republican Senate nominee in Nevada – a key state that could determine control in Washington – marched to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, with two members of the far-right extremist group the Oath Keepers including one who was later charged with sedition and another with breaking into the Capitol and at least two others who were charged for illegally entering the building, according to videos reviewed by CNN’s KFile," Andrew Kaczynski reported. "Courtney Holland, a Nevada-based political activist who does not appear to have entered the Capitol building herself and has not been charged with crimes related to January 6, was named Adam Laxalt’s top spokeswoman in early July."

Former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt is running for U.S. Senate against Sen. Catherine Cortez Mastro (D-NV) after losing the 2018 governor's race.

"Early on the morning of January 6, Holland walked with a group to the main rally, which featured Trump, according to a video in a since-deleted tweet on her account archived on the Internet Wayback Machine. The group included three other speakers listed for the rally near the Capitol," CNN reported. "Following Trump’s rally, Holland was part of a group that now-included four other scheduled speakers for the second rally that made their way toward the Capitol guided by three Oath Keepers, according to videos and photos reviewed by CNN’s KFile. Holland said in a statement to CNN on Tuesday that she did not know the men, describing them as “security.” Two of those Oath Keepers, Kenneth Harrelson and Jason Dolan, have since been charged by the Department of Justice for their role in the Capitol attack"

Laxalt, the son of former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and grandson of former Gov. and Sen. Paul Laxalt (R-NV), was endorsed by Donald Trump last August.

"The documents outlining evidence against Dolan noted both Oath Keepers traveled to Washington together and were frequently together before and during the Capitol riot," CNN reported. "It alleged both men brought weapons to the area that they left in Virginia. Dolan’s indictment from the Department of Justice makes reference to his march from the event near the White House. Numerous members of the Oath Keepers have been charged for their roles breaking into the Capitol building. Last week, the Justice Department released new details that alleged extensive planning by the Oath Keepers to prepare for violence in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, including lessons to conduct “hasty ambushes,” a “death list” of Georgia election officials and attempts to acquire homemade firearms."

https://www.rawstory.com/adam-laxalt-j6-courtney-holland/

[Rick Plant]

48-pages of Pentagon emails provide ‘dramatic’ insight into Trump admin J6 activities: report

The U.S. Department of Defense on Tuesday released 48-pages of Jan. 6 communications following a Freedom of Information Act request from Business Insider.

"As an armed mob rushed toward the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, an aide sent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley an urgent update about congressional office building evacuations and 'escalating protests.' The sources of this information: journalists' tweets," Insider reported.

"Together, this initial release of emails provides dramatic, if decidedly incomplete insight into Trump administration activities in the hours immediately before, during, and after a mob of President Donald Trump's supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6," Insider reported. "One email includes a highly redacted exchange — subject: 'fencing' — between Kash Patel, chief of staff to then-Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, and Anthony Ornato, Trump's deputy White House chief of staff for operations, who drew national attention earlier this month after Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified before the US House's January 6 select committee about him.



Patel previously worked for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA).

"Underscoring the chaotic nature of the Capitol attack, many of the newly released emails contain a moment-by-moment mash-up of direct government intelligence, debunked rumors, and "open source" reports curated from media outlets and social media," Insider reported. "Combined with what is already known about text messages sent to Trump's chief of staff and a high-level Homeland Security official who visited the Capitol in person, the new disclosures highlight a lack of preparation to secure the counting of the electoral votes and a disorganized, ad hoc response to the violent attempt to disrupt that process."

The FOIA request is ongoing and further documents are expected.

Read More Here:

https://www.businessinsider.com/january-6-capitol-attack-pentagon-foia-emails-2022-7

[Rick Plant]

It’s the accumulation’: The Jan. 6 hearings are wounding Trump, after all

Republican insiders say the cumulative effective of the hearings has been to erode support for the former president, at least on the margins.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/20/jan-6-hearings-trump-support-falls-00046662

[Rick Plant]

Just another anti woman right wing white nationalist. No wonder he was part of Donnie's criminal administration. This fascist called the J6 committee "Bolsheviks" when he was part of a criminal regime that tried to steal the election from the American people. These radicals are delusional and total hypocrites.   

Witness Garrett Ziegler lashes out at J6 committee in white nationalist grievance rant



After invoking the Fifth Amendment and executive privilege more than 100 times to refuse to answer questions from the January 6th Committee on Tuesday, former White House aide Garrett Ziegler opened a livestream to vent his frustrations to his followers in a nearly 30-minute rant laden with white nationalist grievance on Telegram.

Ziegler complained that he has less resources to fight the committee than his older cohorts, including his boss former Trade Advisor Peter Navarro, who is suing the committee, and former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who is being prosecuted for contempt.

“They can pay their attorneys to go to trial,” Ziegler said. “I had to be very smart and circumspect. My goal was to avoid a contempt of Congress charge…. It’s going to be very, very hard for them to pass a contempt of Congress charge on me when I’ve given them documents, and I flew out to DC and sat in front of them. If they have a problem with me, they have a problem with the f****ng Fifth Amendment.

Citing his decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination, Ziegler portrayed himself as a victim of left-wing persecution.

“They’re Bolsheviks so they probably do hate the Fifth Amendment, and most white people in general,” he said. “This is a Bolshevist, anti-white campaign…. They see me as a young Christian who they can basically try to scare.”

Ziegler, who reshares white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes’ content and has called Cambodia a “s***hole country” on his Telegram channel, quickly added: “I’m the least racist person that many of you have ever met, by the way. I have no bigotry. I just try to see the world for where it is.”

Then, his rant veered into misogyny when he lamented that no one else in his generation was defying the January 6th committee, because “the other people in the White House are total hos and thots.” He specifically named Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows whose bombshell testimony revealed that President Trump wanted to let supporters with guns into the rally at the Ellipse, and Alyssa Farah Griffin, the former White House director of strategic communications and assistant to the president who reportedly showed up to support Hutchinson when she testified.

Ziegler reported that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) logged in to the interview by teleconference, but ducked out when he realized he wasn’t going to learn any new information.

“It was a boring hour,” Ziegler said. It was an awkward hour. I loathe these people.”

While spurning the committee, Ziegler provided additional detail about his role in facilitating a heated meeting at the White House on Dec. 18, 2020 in which attorney Sidney Powell, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne urged President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and order the National Guard to seize ballots and re-run the election.

“What I did is I sent them a URL to a form to fill out to then they can request to the Secret Service to be admitted onto the property,” Ziegler said on Tuesday. “That’s exactly what I did. I did nothing more. I wasn’t even at the White House grounds when that meeting occurred. I had gone home because it was very late at night. I had no idea what they were discussing. I hoped that — my reason for sending the URL to the form was that somebody would advise the president to make a call to governors to get the National Guard to hand-count the paper ballots. I had no idea about the machines.”

Previously, Ziegler has told fellow election denier David K. Clements that he and Patrick Weaver, another White House aide in the National Security Council, worked together to let Powell, Flynn and Byrne into the White House.

“Basically, I had the visitor access,” Ziegler said. “And he went down and got General Flynn and Sidney Powell.”

https://www.rawstory.com/ziegler-testimony/

[Rick Plant]

MAGA lawmakers who trembled during J6 attack will be 'humiliated' at Thursday hearing

GOP lawmakers are going target Republican lawmakers during Thursday's primetime hearing by the House Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Attack at the U.S. Capitol.

"The Jan. 6 committee plans to use its Thursday night hearing to call out insurrection-friendly lawmakers who cowered during the Capitol attack but have since downplayed the insurrection’s severity," Rolling Stone reported Wednesday, citing "two sources familiar with the committee’s planning."

One source told the magazine, “they have plans to paint a really striking picture of how some of Trump’s greatest enablers of his coup plot were — no matter what they’re saying today — quaking in their boots and doing everything shy of crying out for their moms."

“If any of [these lawmakers] were capable of shame, they would be humiliated," the source added.

Thursday's hearing will also reportedly feature new video evidence.

"The bulk of the Thursday night hearing is expected to focus on Trump’s actions during the insurrection, including whether he took any action to defuse the riot at a time when lawmakers were under attack," the magazine reported. "But using photos and footage to slap down MAGA lawmakers’ claims of a 'tourist visit' from 'peaceful patriots' is part of a broader effort to bring reality to bear on a fictitious, pro-Trump reimagining of Jan. 6."

One such moment occurred after Rep. Andrew Clyde compared that unsuccessful insurrection to a "normal tourist visit."

Republican Rep. Andrew Clyde , the person screaming at the far left of this photo, is the person who recently likened the brutal, wildly out of control, deadly violent Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol to overthrow the will of the people, to a "normal tourist visit."



Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., second from top left, helps barricade the House chamber door as rioters disrupt the joint session of Congress to certify the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2021.



https://twitter.com/pennstatetom/status/1393382541130936324

[Rick Plant]

Jan. 6 panel to detail Trump’s 187 minutes of delay as insurrection grew



The U.S. House committee investigating the Jan.6 attack and Donald Trump’s role in it will focus in a Thursday evening hearing on the former president’s refusal for more than three hours to call off the rioters storming the U.S. Capitol, committee aides said Wednesday.

The hearing will be the eighth in the panel’s series to document its findings but is the first evening meeting since its initial presentation last month. It will begin at 8 p.m. ET and can be watched on a livestream here.

The committee leaders once indicated the series would comprise eight major public hearings, but aides now say more are likely, as the panel has heard from additional witnesses since the start of public meetings.

“There is potential for future hearings,” a committee aide said. “As we continue to gather evidence, continue to hear from witnesses, the committee will make a determination.” 

Committee members Elaine Luria, a Democrat from Virginia, and Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger will lead the Thursday’s hearing, aides said. Chairman Bennie G. Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, will participate remotely after he tested positive for COVID-19 this week.

The hearing will examine Trump’s actions in the 187 minutes between the end of his speech on the White House Ellipse at about 1:10 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, and when he tweeted a video asking his supporters to leave the Capitol at 4:17 p.m., aides said.

Trump knew of the violence happening at the Capitol, where Congress was scheduled to certify the 2020 election results, aides said. Trump was the only person with the power to call off the attack, but declined to do so, the committee will show, according to aides.

Rather than intervene, Trump inflamed the mob with a tweet about Vice President Mike Pence.

Wendy Via, the president and cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a group that has provided expert analysis to the committee, said in a Wednesday interview that the Pence tweet “shows intent” to incite a riot to disrupt the transfer of power.

Trump knew or should have known that tweet would agitate the crowd, she said.

The panel will show who in the White House, including Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman, spoke to Trump on Jan. 6.

The panel has not announced which witnesses will testify live, citing security concerns.

Testimony from the deposition of Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, whom the committee questioned last week after it had already conducted six hearings, is expected to be a major part of the hearing.

Cipollone provided information on every aspect of Trump’s plan to overturn the election result, which the committee has detailed over its seven previous hearings, aides said.


The panel changed course and reordered the information it presented as more testimony came in, Via said. Cipollone coming forward “was huge,” she said.

Former Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson also provided much more information midway through the series after she changed her legal team. Hutchinson was the sole witness at a surprise hearing last month that detailed Trump’s activities on Jan. 6 and the days leading up to it.

https://www.azmirror.com/blog/jan-6-panel-to-detail-trumps-187-minutes-of-delay-as-insurrection-grew/


J6 to air damning video evidence of Trump on Jan. 7 during Thursday primetime hearing



New video evidence of Donald Trump will be played at Thursday's primetime hearing by the House Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

"One day after the last rioter had left the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump’s advisers urged him to give an address to the nation to condemn the violence, demand accountability for those who had stormed the halls of Congress and declare the 2020 election to be decided," The Washington Post reported Thursday. "He struggled to do it. Over the course of an hour of trying to tape the message, Trump resisted holding the rioters to account, trying to call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over, according to individuals familiar with the committee’s work."

The hearing will occur despite the select committee only now getting documents from the Secret Service, which deleted text messages.

"The public could get its first glimpse of outtakes from that recording Thursday night, when the Jan. 6 committee plans to offer a bold conclusion in its eighth hearing: Not only did Trump do nothing despite repeated entreaties by senior aides to help end the violence, but he sat back and enjoyed watching it," the newspaper reported. "He reluctantly condemned it — in a three-minute speech the evening of Jan. 7 — only after the efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed and after aides told him that members of his own Cabinet were discussing invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office."

J6 aides are calling Thursday's hearing the "187-minute hearing."

"The hearing is also expected to tie together details from prior hearings, including the inflammatory presidential rhetoric that drew thousands to Washington that day, Trump’s willingness to grant audiences to fringe figures peddling fabulist and unconstitutional theories on how he could keep hold of the presidency and the many times he was urged to intervene during the violence but refused to do so," the newspaper reported. "All of it points to one conclusion, which the committee plans to argue Thursday: Trump wanted the violence, he is responsible for it and his unwillingness to help end it amounts to a dereliction of duty and a violation of his oath of office."

Read the full report: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/20/even-day-after-jan-6-trump-balked-condemning-violence/

[Rick Plant]

'I smell a rat': J6 panelist questions the Secret Service's 'disappeared' text messages from Jan. 6



WASHINGTON, D.C. — It was revealed on Tuesday evening that the U.S. Secret Service turned over a single text message from what their agents exchanged on Jan. 5 and 6.

Ahead of a data migration, the Secret Service received four requests from congressional committees to preserve records on Jan. 16, but on Jan. 25 they moved through a migration process anyway, despite knowing the data wasn't backed up to comply with the subpoenas.

"It's still a mystery to me, but I smell a rat," Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told reporters on Wednesday on Capitol Hill. "That seems like an awfully strange coincidence for all of those text messages to be vanished into oblivion on two days when there was also the worst violent insurrection after the Civil War."

What isn't currently clear is if the Secret Service also has no texts or communications from Jan. 4, 7, 8 or other days in Jan. 2021.

Former White House photographer Pete Souza explained that due to the Presidential Records Act, it didn't matter if someone deleted something from their device that all emails and texts were automatically backed up to the system. He asked if the Department of Homeland Security has an exception and if so, why.

Speaking to MSNBC on Wednesday, Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig revealed "there are a lot of techies out there who think they can recreate their records, but stay tuned. We'll see."

Former Watergate Prosecutor Jill Wine Banks noted, responding to reporter Hugo Lowell's piece at The Guardian, that the Secret Service is good at reconstructing lost text messages then which likely means "they are also good at deleting them completely from all backup devices and the cloud. Doubtful it's accidental if they can be recovered."

Under its umbrella, the Secret Service operates The National Computer Forensics Institute, which calls itself an "innovative facility is the nation’s premier law enforcement training facility in cyber and electronic crime forensics." Their site says that they are there to "educate state, local, tribal, territorial law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges in the continually evolving cyber and electronic crime related threats, and educate, train and equip them with the tools necessary for forensic examinations to combat those crimes."

When asked if she thinks there are more text messages that the Secret Service can find, House Select Committee member, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), simply said, "We'll find out."

Read More at The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/19/secret-service-one-text-message-january-6-committee



Here's how the J6 committee can recover the Secret Service's vanished information



On Wednesday's edition of MSNBC's "The ReidOut," former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner outlined the best way to recover the information wiped by Secret Service agents off their equipment, in what some experts believe to be a violation of the law.

Even if the data is not recoverable, said Kirschner, the January 6 Committee can put them under oath and make them recall as much of it as they can.

"Glenn, the Federal Records Act, violating that law, there would in fact be consequences for that, but since they can't find these records, you can't really reconstruct what the texts might have said," said anchor Joy Reid. "How would this each be approached potentially if there were violations of the law here?"

"Well, one way you can try to recreate what those text messages said is to put everybody under subpoena," said Kirschner. "Place them under oath and ask them, for example, when you were in the basement of the Capitol in the loading dock trying to urge the vice president to get into the car and he said what Representative Raskin said were the six most chilling words, 'I'm not getting in the car,' what did you communicate to your fellow Secret Service agents? I mean, put them under oath and sweat them."

Even just what is already known about the text message deletion, argued Kirschner, is enough for prosecutors to start investigating.

"You know, look, at this point, Joy, let's call it what it is," said Kirschner. "They were asked to preserve texts and they deleted them. That, to me, feels like what we call adequate predication, a fancy term for enough evidence to open a criminal probe. If the Secret Service did nothing wrong, then they should welcome an FBI investigation into something that really looks nefarious?"

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Jan. 6 committee reveals new details about Secret Service deleting critical evidence



One day before the eighth public hearing by the Jan. 6 select committee, it is revealing new details about the text messages reportedly destroyed by the U.S. Secret Service.

"The U.S. Secret Service has determined it has no new texts to provide Congress relevant to its Jan. 6 investigation, and that any other texts its agents exchanged around the time of the 2021 attack on the Capitol were purged, according to a senior official briefed on the matter," Carol Leonnig reported for The Washington Post on Tuesday. "Also, the National Archives on Tuesday sought more information on 'the potential unauthorized deletion' of agency text messages."

On Wednesday, 560 days after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the select committee revealed that the Secret Service has begun producing documents.

"The Secret Service has begun producing records pursuant to the subpoena we issued last week and our investigators are assessing that information," the select committee announced. "We have concerns about a system migration that we have been told resulted in the erasure of Secret Service cell phone data."

"The U.S. Secret Service system migration process went forward on January 27, 2021, just three weeks after the attack on the Capitol in which the Vice President of the United States while under the protection of the Secret Service, was steps from a violent mob hunting for him," the select committee continued. "The procedure for preserving content prior to this purge appears to have been contrary to federal records retention requirements and may represent a possible violation of the Federal Records Act. The Select Committee is seeking additional Secret Service records as well."

The deletion has drawn increased scrutiny as the Secret Service runs a "state-of-the-art, 40,000 square foot" National Computer Forensics Institute (NCFI).

"Irony with the missing US Secret Service texts from 5 January and 6 January 2021 is that their cyber forensics team is considered by top current and former US Attorneys as the best in the business — and if anyone could reconstruct lost texts, they could," Guardian correspondent Hugo Lowell reported.

But MSNBC legal analyst Jill Wine-Banks, who was a Watergate prosecutor before serving as the first female general counsel of the U.S. Army, had a different take than that it was ironic.

"The thing is if they are good at reconstructing lost texts, they are also good at deleting them completely from all backup devices and the cloud. Doubtful it's accidental if they can't be recovered," she argued.

Read More Here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/19/secret-service-texts/


Legal experts lash out at Secret Service in scathing op-ed: Your explanations won't wash



The U.S. Secret Service motto is "Worthy of Trust and Confidence." Recent events, including the apparent deletion of Jan. 6 evidence, have put a large question mark after that phrase, and the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection is moving to answer the question. Producing a complete inventory of the agency's texts around Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, is vital to the committee's search for truth.

The Secret Service was already embroiled in controversy about whether former agents may have been involved in witness intimidation targeting star committee witness Cassidy Hutchinson for her testimony about Trump's violent intent on Jan. 6. Then, on July 13, it emerged that the agency had deleted text messages relating to what happened on Jan. 5 and 6, and apparently did so after Inspector General Joseph Cuffaris requested them. Next, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said that some of the agency's phone data had been lost due to a "pre-planned, three-month system migration" requiring agents to reset their mobile phones. The committee subpoenaed the texts. According to committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, the Secret Service said "they, in fact, had "pertinent texts." But on July 19, the Service announced it had nothing further to produce, apparently contradicting the statement that "none of the texts . . . had been lost."

The Service has vigorously denied the IG's charges that it obfuscated or "maliciously" deleted texts. But when an agency cannot seem to keep its story straight, it is Congress' oversight responsibility to penetrate the fog of facts.

That the agency has offered shifting explanations about the disappearing texts is alarming — their relevance would have been obvious to any law enforcement agency. Without question, any scheduled data deletion or device-replacement program should have been immediately suspended due to the paramount importance of preserving evidence regarding the historically unprecedented events of Jan. 6.

One of us (Eisen) worked regularly with the Secret Service, including on records-handling issues, as a former White House special counsel. The other two (Baron and Aftergut) are former federal prosecutors and experienced civil lawyers. We can say without hesitation that multiple Secret Service leaders and their attorneys would have known on Jan. 6 that an investigation of the Capitol insurrection was inevitable and that the Service would be asked for all pertinent communications, including its texts.

We can say without hesitation that Secret Service leaders and their attorneys would have known immediately that an investigation of the Capitol insurrection was inevitable.

Any litigator, including those at Secret Service, would also know that once the agency received a specific document preservation request, they were obligated to issue instructions throughout the agency regarding actions required to preserve data with potential evidentiary value. Lawyers who fail in that duty are subject to professional disciplinary action.

Companies changing information systems and migrating data routinely back up the data with multiple safeguards to ensure it is saved. Tools for such backups are widely available.

Even without backup, in the modern world deleted text messages are rarely irretrievable. Computer forensic recovery capabilities are so robust that data seldom truly disappears. Data security experts can usually show whether someone tried to scrub information — and those experts can often reconstruct the deleted data.

Because deletions of Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, texts apparently occurred after requests by Inspector General Cuffari, the Secret Service has some uncomfortable explaining to do for its failure to create adequate backup. Should the missing texts be forensically retrieved, they may help call Donald Trump to account, along with his tight circle of advisers who assisted in fomenting the Jan. 6 violence.

If the committee finds intentional deletion at the Secret Service after an IG information request, then another piece in an emerging obstruction of justice mosaic may fall into place. Destroying evidence with the intent to influence or obstruct a federal investigation is a federal offense. Multiple other potential offenses are cited by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in a July 18 complaint letter to the attorney general and FBI regarding the text deletions.

Recovered text messages could shed bright light on multiple central issues:

- Advance information, if any, the Secret Service possessed about firearms, bear spray and other weapons in the hands of pro-Trump demonstrators marching on the Capitol – or any coordinated planning to interfere with the Electoral College process.The extent to which Trump had been briefed on intelligence about potential violence and electoral disruption.

- Further corroboration of Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony that after Trump's Jan. 6 Ellipse speech, he directed his Secret Service detail to take him to Capitol Hill to lead marchers whom he knew were armed and attempting to interfere with the constitution's electoral certification process.

- Whether Trump or the Secret Service had planned to remove Vice President Mike Pence from the Capitol to prevent him from presiding over the electoral vote count. Pence reportedly told the Secret Service detail on Jan. 6, when agents asked to evacuate him: "I'm not getting in the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off." Had Pence entered the vice presidential limo, he might have never certified the presidential election results, plunging the nation into uncharted waters.

In fairness, the Secret Service says it has already turned over phone data from 20 agents, 790,000 unredacted emails and other documents, as well as providing hours of formal testimony from its agents. Perhaps more is coming.

In any case, one question committee investigators cannot avoid is whether the Secret Service deviated from standard procedures at the behest of people the Trump administration placed in command there.

During Trump's administration, unprecedented coziness appears to have existed between the Secret Service and the White House. For example, Anthony Ornato was the Service's deputy assistant director who headed Trump's security detail until Trump made him White House deputy chief of staff for operations in December 2019.

While on Trump's staff, Ornato helped coordinate the infamous June 2020 Trump photo-op across from Lafayette Park, when police and military forcefully attacked peaceable political demonstrators. Following Hutchinson's June 2022 testimony, other former Trump administration aides have said that Ornato has a history of changing his story to protect Trump. Ornato is now back at Secret Service as an assistant director, and should be available to return to testify before the committee.

Given the reasonable probability of the House select committee recovering missing texts, Secret Service witnesses must bear in mind the danger of getting caught in a lie under oath. The committee has shown time and again that there is no substitute for the truth that is emerging from many of those closest to the events of Jan. 6.

The Secret Service deserves an opportunity to fully explain the process by which the texts came to be deleted. But it is clear that this most important chapter in the history of our republic can only be fully and accurately written with access to those missing texts or truthful testimony about what they would have revealed.

https://www.rawstory.com/secret-service-2657700184/