Loss of Secret Service texts from Jan. 6 baffles experts

Experts are divided over whether the disappearance of phone data from around the time of the insurrection is a sign of incompetence, an intentional coverup, or some murkier middle ground. But the failure has raised suspicions about the disposition of records that could provide intimate details about what happened on that chaotic day, and whose preservation was mandated by federal law.

“This was the most singularly stressful day for the Secret Service since the attempted assassination of [Ronald] Reagan,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a senior policy official at the Department of Homeland Security during the George W. Bush administration who’s now a cybersecurity consultant in Washington. “Why apparently was there no interest in preserving records for the purposes of doing an after-action review? It’s like we have a 9/11 attack and air traffic control wipes its records.”

Rosenzweig said he polled 11 of his friends with cybersecurity backgrounds, including information-security chiefs at federal agencies, on whether any of them had ever done a migration without a plan for backing up data and restoring it. None of them had. “There’s a relatively high degree of skepticism about [the Secret Service] in the group,” he said.

The Secret Service said it began deleting data from officials’ phones in the same month as the Capitol siege, when its agents were among the closest eyewitnesses both to President Donald Trump, now under criminal investigation for his push to overturn the election, and to Vice President Mike Pence, who had narrowly escaped the mob.

The agency said the deletions were part of a preplanned “system migration,” that agents had been instructed to back up their own phones, and that any “insinuation” of malicious intent is wrong.

But tech experts said such a migration is a task that smaller organizations routinely accomplish without error. The agency also went through with its reset of the phones more than a week after Jan. 16, 2021, when House committees told officials at DHS to hand over all relevant “documents or materials” as part of their investigations into the deadly assault.

The error likely means that the information, which could reveal details critical to the Jan. 6 committee’s ongoing investigation, may be extremely challenging if not impossible to retrieve. Some of the data may remain on the phones, even after deletion, but with options for unlocking it that are slim to none.

If the Secret Service had truly wanted to preserve agents’ messages, experts said, it should have been almost trivially easy to do so. Backups and exports are a basic feature of nearly every messaging service, and federal law requires such records to be safeguarded and submitted to the National Archives.

Several experts were critical of the…