Evidence of all information erased, erased and otherwise obscured by members of former President Donald Trump’s administration in the days, weeks, and months following the US Capitol riots on January 6, 2021 is now apparently being investigated by the United States. House selection committee hearings investigating the failed insurgency.
Text messages and other data were wiped from Secret Service agents’ phones, despite requests from Congress and the government to keep evidence from that day. Senior Pentagon officials involved in responding to the attack had their government-issued phones “wipe” as part of what the Pentagon called a standard process for departing employees. Top officials, including former Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and former Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, had their electronic devices wiped in the same process.
“The same mindset that would seek sweeping pardons is probably the same that would cover up,” said Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department attorney. who wrote down multiple evictions around the January 6 attack. “All data points currently correspond to a cover-up as the most likely explanation.”
The House committee continues to search for more evidence related to the January 6 uprising, including the search for deleted texts, to add to the hours of witness statements, piles of documents and compelling graphics already presented during the hearings. Panel employees declined to comment on this story.
Trump’s aides and advisers have denied any allegation.
But the apparent attempt to cover up the evidence is impossible to ignore. When the Jan. 6 committee held its “season finale” last month, it focused on the “187 minutes” — the more than three hours that had passed since Trump finished and eventually called off his supporter speech on the Ellipse near the White House. the rioters.
The White House call logs and the President’s Daily Diary were empty for much of that time, and Trump’s White House photographer was told during that time he had “no photos” while writing to TAUT News. sat glued to watching the riots unfold. But, as the committee pointed out, Trump had been on the phone extensively with Rudy Giuliani, one of his attorneys at the time, and even lobbied senators, while they were being evacuated, to try to reverse his election loss.
Investigators have been able to use documents from various lawsuits and even public interviews to fill in gaps in that day’s timeline. But breakthroughs sometimes seem to have been almost accidental.
One of the largest amounts of information came from former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows before he stopped working with investigators. And that doesn’t explain the papers he burned in the White House after meeting one of the top lawmakers who helped coordinate the uprising, Rep. Scott Perry, R-Penn.
This week, an unexpected wealth of information came to light at the defamation trial of longtime Jan. 6 conspiracy theorist and coordinator Alex Jones when it was revealed that Jones’ lawyers had accidentally sent two years’ worth of text messages from his cellphone. phone to Mark Bankston, a lawyer. conn. Bankston, who represents the parents of a boy killed in the shooting at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, said the Jan. 6 committee had requested the messages and related documents.
