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WASHINGTON (AP) — Top Democrats in Congress have requested interviews and internal documents from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general as part of a deepening investigation into the agency’s handling of now-deleted Secret Service text messages about the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Leaders of the powerful House Oversight and Homeland Security committees wrote a letter to Inspector General Joseph Kufari on Monday, describing the urgent need for interviews with his staff about new evidence of alleged attempts to cover up the deletion of Secret Service communications.
“We are writing to you with serious new concerns about your lack of transparency and independence that appear to threaten the integrity of a crucial investigation led by your office,” House Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney and Homeland Security Chairman Benny Thompson wrote in the letter. They also renewed calls for Kufari to recuse himself from investigations into the deleted texts.
The committees said they received evidence showing that the inspector general’s office first learned of the missing Secret Service text messages as part of its investigation into the May 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. And that emails between senior officials the DHS IG show, the agency decided to abandon efforts to recover those text messages in July 2021, nearly a year before they first informed Congress that they had been deleted.
“These documents raise troubling new concerns that not only did your office fail to notify Congress for more than a year that critical evidence was missing from this investigation, but that your senior staff deliberately chose not to pursue that evidence and then appeared to take steps to cover it up these failures,” the letter continued.
Cuffari sent a letter to both committees last month disclosing that Secret Service text messages sent and received around Jan. 6, 2021, were deleted despite requests from Congress and federal investigators that they be preserved.
The deletion of the messages raised the prospect of lost evidence that could shed further light on then-President Donald Trump’s actions during the riot, especially after testimony of his confrontation with security as he tried to join supporters at the Capitol. Since that July 19 letter, a series of revelations about the mishandling of those communications by the Secret Service and DHS have come to light, prompting Congress to launch an investigation into the matter.
Monday’s letter notes an email dated July 27, 2021, where Thomas Kite, deputy IG, wrote to Jim Crumpacker, senior liaison officer at DHS: “Jim, please use this email as a reference to our conversation in which I said we are no longer requesting phone records and text messages from the USSS (United States Secret Service) related to the events of January 6th.
The lawmakers said they wanted to know why watchdog officials chose “not to pursue critical information from the Secret Service at this stage of this investigation” and decided to renew their request to DHS for certain text messages more than four months later. in December 2021
Lawmakers also disclosed Monday that Ken Cuccinelli, who served as DHS deputy secretary on Jan. 6, was using a personal phone at the time, but the inspector general did not report that fact to Congress. Cuccinelli’s texts, along with those of then-acting secretary Chad Wolf, were also deleted.
The lawmakers requested that the IG’s office turn over by Aug. 8 all documents and communications related to the decision not to collect or recover text messages and related to the deletion, erasure, unavailability or recovery of text messages from the Secret Service, Wolfe and Cuccinelli.
The committees also asked the agency to make Kite and fellow Deputy Inspector General Kristen Fredricks available for transcribed interviews no later than August 15.
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