The Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security has ordered the Secret Service to stop its internal investigations into its deleted text messages because it could interfere with his own investigation of what happened. I was wondering why this hadn’t happened yet, frankly. Given the facts as we know them, no Secret Service investigation would be credible. And it would be hard to have confidence that it would not become a vehicle for destroying or covering up evidence about the data purge itself.
Questions over the destruction of data have now crept into the Inspector General’s office itself. According to the Post, the IG’s office has known about the document destruction since February — five months ago — and failed to notify Congress despite the obvious centrality of the documents to the Jan. 6th investigations. In October 2021 the office draw up a public alert accusing the Secret Service and other DHS agencies of stonewalling document requests tied to the Jan 6th investigation. But the alert was never sent out. These revelations come from two whistleblowers.
