The United States Department of Defense erased the content of the phones of its senior officials in the last days of the Donald Trump Administration (2017-2021), including any possible reference to the assault on Capitol Hill by thousands of his followers on January 6 of 2021.
As reported on Tuesday by CNN and CNBC, the Pentagon removed all content from the devices of senior Army officials and civilians with responsibility for the Armed Forces such as then-Defense Secretary Chris Miller, then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, and former chief of staff, Kash Patel.
Miller, Patel and McCarthy are considered crucial witnesses in understanding the administration's response to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol and former President Donald Trump's reaction. All three were involved in the Department of Defense's response to sending National Guard troops to the Capitol as the riots raged. There is no indication that the officials themselves deleted the files.
The information comes from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that the organization American Oversight filed against the Department of Defense and the Army. "It's amazing that the agency didn't understand the importance of preserving their records, particularly [regarding] the top officials they might have kept -- what they were doing, when they were doing it, why they were doing it, that day," he told CNN Heather Sawyer, executive director of American Oversight. The non-profit entity asks the Department of Justice to investigate the destruction of material.
The news comes days after another revelation was made public as a result of efforts to provide transparency into the events of January 6. On July 21, the Department of Homeland Security opened a criminal investigation into the deletion of messages that Secret Service agents sent on January 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol assault.
The Deputy Inspector General of the DHS, Gladys Ayala, asked on that occasion by means of a letter to the director of the Secret Service, James Murray, to cease his own investigation into what happened because there is already one open in his portfolio. The Secret Service, the body in charge of protecting the country's president, among others, has determined that it cannot recover the deleted text messages that were sent on January 5 and 6 a year ago.
The House of Representatives committee investigating the assault on Capitol Hill had requested those exchanges, but has only been able to receive one. The rest were removed as part of a previously planned system migration, and the committee believes that the procedure for preserving the content may not have adhered to current requirements and may have violated the Federal Records Act.
