The Daily Fuckup

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol subpoenaed the Secret Service on July 15, 2022, seeking text messages and related records from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021. The demand came after the Department of Homeland Security inspector general briefed lawmakers on July 13 about problems retrieving some messages from that period, and after the Secret Service said on July 14 that a preplanned device migration had contributed to the loss of some data.

The key dispute was not whether the records mattered. It was how they went missing. The Secret Service said the messages were not intentionally deleted. That mattered because the committee was trying to reconstruct what agents and supervisors were seeing and saying during the security failure that unfolded around the Capitol and the president that day.

In a probe built on timelines, witness accounts and contemporaneous communications, the subpoena was an effort to recover primary records from a critical 48-hour window. Those records could have helped investigators determine who knew what, when they knew it and how information moved through the chain of command. The loss of some texts did not prove a cover-up or settle the larger questions around Jan. 6. But it did leave another hole in the paper trail.

The subpoena also sharpened scrutiny of records handling inside the federal government. A preplanned migration may explain how the messages disappeared. It does not make the missing records less relevant to a congressional investigation that depended on them.