By Jeremy Herb and Whitney Wild, CNN
Updated 2110 GMT (0510 HKT) 30 July 2022
Washington (CNN) Questions about Secret Service text messages that could be deleted around Jan. 6 began surfacing earlier this month with a letter from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general that raised a wall. new investigation for the January 6 committee of the House as well as questions about the role of both the agency and the inspector general himself, Joseph Cuffari.
But the question of the possible loss of messages goes back more than a year before, as the Secret Service and the watchdog went back and forth on the loss of data on several occasions. As CNN reported on Friday, Cuffari’s office knew about the missing texts from May 2021, months earlier than previously known.
Here’s a timeline of how the Secret Service messages became one of the key questions for the House committee as it prepares for the next phase of its probe into the attack on the US Capitol. United States on January 6, 2021.
January 16, 2021: Ten days after the insurrection at the Capitol, four House committees send a letter to Homeland Security and other relevant agencies instructing them to preserve records related to January 6.
It is not yet clear whether the Secret Service received the guidance. A source familiar with the investigation told CNN that the Secret Service tried to find her last week but was unable to.
January 25, 2021: The Secret Service “taught employees how to preserve content on their phones,” sending a reminder to employees that a pre-planned data migration would wipe their phones, according to a Secret Service letter sent to a House select committee in July. 19, 2022. The Secret Service’s internal announcement made it clear that employees were solely responsible for saving the records that had to be preserved by law.
January 27, 2021: Microsoft Intune phone migration begins, according to the agency’s July 19 letter to the House select committee.
February 26, 2021: DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari requests electronic communications from the Secret Service for the first time, according to agency spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. “DHS OIG first requested electronic communications on February 26, 2021, after the migration was well underway. The Secret Service notified DHS OIG of the data loss of certain phones, but confirmed to -OIG that none of the texts it was looking for had been lost in the migration,” said Guglielmi in a statement of July 14, 2022.
March 25, 2021: House committee chairs send letters to the White House and several federal agencies seeking documents and communications related to the January 6 attack. Among the agencies receiving a letter is the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service.
April 1, 2021: The Intune migration is complete, according to the agency’s letter.
May 2021: The Secret Service notifies the DHS inspector general about missing text messages related to the phone data migration issue, according to sources. The agency tells Cuffari’s office that the Secret Service tried to contact a cellular provider to retrieve the texts when they realized they were lost, a CNN source said.
Key personnel in the Secret Service mistakenly believed the data was backed up and did not realize it was permanently lost until the data migration was complete, the source said.
June 11, 2021: The DHS inspector general requests messages “sent or received by 24 Secret Service personnel during the period from December 7, 2020 to January 8, 2021.” CNN previously reported that the heads of Trump’s and Pence’s security details are among the 24 individuals.
The Secret Service responded to the request by submitting one message. That message was from former US Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund to former Secret Service Uniform Division Chief Thomas Sullivan asking for help on January 6.
July 2021: A DHS deputy inspector general tells DHS that the inspector general’s office is no longer looking into messages from the Secret Service, according to two sources.
December 2021: The DHS inspector general reopens its inquiry into the Secret Service messages. According to the letter that House Oversight Chairman Carolyn Maloney and Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson sent last week asking Cuffari to recuse himself from the probe, the inspector general’s office said from the Secret Service messages have been deleted. A DHS source said CNN Cuffari’s office has been notified again of the data loss.
January 28, 2022: The DHS inspector general’s office notifies its employees of an investigation into the DHS inspector general being conducted by the Council of Inspectors General for Integrity and Efficiency, the umbrella group for inspectors general. The probe is related to allegations of retaliation following an independent review of office culture.
February 2022: The Secret Service notifies the DHS inspector general for a third time of the data migration issue, according to a DHS source. In early February, according to reporting by the Washington Post, staff in Cuffari’s office planned to contact all DHS agencies offering to have data specialists help retrieve text messages from the phones theirs. But later that month, the Post reports that Cuffari’s office decided not to collect or review any of the agency’s phones.
In late February, according to the Washington Post, Cuffari learned that text messages for two top DHS officials under the Trump administration were missing, and that they had been lost in a reset of their government phones when they left their employment in January 2021.
June 28, 2022: Former Trump White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, testifies before the House select committee. She says he told her about a heated argument between former President Donald Trump and his Secret Service detail after Trump told him he couldn’t travel to the Capitol on January 6. The testimony raises new questions about the actions of the Secret Service on January 6.
July 14, 2022: Cuffari writes in a letter to the House and Senate Homeland Security Committees that the Department of Homeland Security has notified his office of “many United States Secret Service messages from -5 and 6 January 2021, canceled as part of a device replacement. program.”
15 July 2022: The inspector general’s office informs the House select committee about the Secret Service texts. On the same day, the select committee issues a subpoena for records related to January 6.
July 19, 2022: The Secret Service responds to the House select committee by providing thousands of records. “Our delivery included thousands of pages of documents, Secret Service cell phone usage and other policies, as well as operational and planning records,” Guglielmi said in a statement.
The agency also said it is still taking steps to try to recover text messages, writing in a letter to the committee that it was looking at metadata to determine which messages could have been sent and interviewing the 24 Secret Service employees in question.
Also on July 19, the National Archives sent a letter to DHS requesting a report documenting any inappropriate deletion of messages.
July 20, 2022: DHS deputy inspector general Gladys Ayala writes to the Secret Service informing the agency that the inspector general’s office is investigating the circumstances surrounding the possible deleted texts as part of an ongoing criminal investigation, as first reported by CNN. In the letter, the inspector general’s office orders the Secret Service to stop its own investigation, writing that it could interfere with the criminal probe.
Before that letter was sent, the Secret Service had identified metadata indicating that texts were sent or received on the phones of 10 of the 24 Secret Service employees around January 6, 2021, and the agency was looking to determine whether they contained relevant information that should have been preserved, CNN reported.
July 26, 2022: Thompson and Maloney ask Cuffari to turn the text message investigation over to another inspector general, questioning his ability to lead the probe. The lawmakers write in a letter to Cuffari that his failure to notify Congress about the missing texts in a timely manner “casts serious doubt on his independence and his ability to effectively conduct such an investigation important.” July 28, 2022: Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate the missing messages from before January 6. The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.
