Luria says committee has to ‘get to the bottom of’ whether Secret Service deleted Jan. 6 records

Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, said on Sunday that the committee was examining whether the Secret Service deleted text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6.

When asked by CNN “State of the Union” co-anchor Dana Bash about recent conflicting accounts of the agency’s preservation of texts from those days, Luria said the committee was “looking into this.”

“That’s what we have to get to the bottom of,” Luria said.

“There’s a requirement for federal agencies to maintain records,” she continued. “An agency that was such a key part of a critical event in our history — one would assume they have done everything possible to preserve those records, to analyze them, to determine what kind of things went right or went wrong that day.”

The committee subpoenaed the text messages and other Secret Service records relating to Jan. 6 after the Department of Homeland Security inspector general sent a letter to the House and Senate Homeland Security committees stating that the text messages were deleted as part of a “device-replacement program.” 

The Secret Service pushed back on the letter, saying the agency had been cooperating with the inspector general’s investigation and claiming it did not “maliciously delete” text messages. 

Luria on Sunday noted that the committee was working to see if the records still exist or could be recovered.

“We want to make sure that we understand the bottom line. Where are these text messages?” she said. “Can they be recovered? And we’ve subpoenaed them because they’re legal records that we need to see for the committee.”

The Secret Service has come under pressure for the reportedly deleted texts and its actions on Jan. 6.

Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testified publicly to the committee last month that she heard then-President Trump lunged at the steering wheel and an agent in his presidential vehicle following a rally on Jan. 6 as he demanded to join his supporters at the Capitol.