What messages could be missing from DHS phones?

The Washington Post’s big story on missing texts from Department of Homeland Security phones landed yesterday like a proverbial bombshell.  First it was January 6 Secret Service texts that went missing, and now there’s another coverup? They must be digging new landfill somewhere out in Maryland for all the wiped cellphones these two agencies “migrated” and “reset” in the final days of Trump administration.  This time it was the two most senior officials in the Department of Homeland Security whose phones were wiped: Acting Director Chad Wolf and – get this – his “Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Deputy Secretary,” Ken Cuccinelli.

You may recall dear Chad as the architect of the Department of Homeland Security’s so-called family separation policy.  He was chief of staff to then Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who was in overall charge of the policy that separated children as young as a few months old from their mothers and fathers when they crossed the border with Mexico and applied for asylum.  Thousands of children were separated and then promptly lost in an ill-run system that put children on buses and sent them around the country without keeping records of who they were or where they went. 

We know what messages the January 6 Committee was looking for when they attempted to subpoena the texts from the Secret Service.  They wanted evidence that would corroborate testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson that there was a physical confrontation between Trump and his two Secret Service agents immediately after his speech on the Ellipse when he demanded to be taken to the Capitol.  Hutchinson heard the story almost immediately after the confrontation from Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Tony Ornato.  He has since denied that he told Hutchinson about Trump’s attempt to grab the steering wheel of his armored SUV.  Investigators for the January 6 Committee were hoping that text messages on Ornato’s phone and the phones of other Secret Service agents on duty at the time would confirm Hutchinson’s testimony, which was done under oath.  Ornato has since lawyered-up and is resisting attempts to make him testify under oath before the committee.

But what messages could be on Wolf’s and Cuccinelli’s phones?  Well, going back to December of 2020, there was the time that Trump ordered his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to try to get Wolf to use the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines, apparently so they could be examined for Venezuelan and Chinese hacking that Trump believed had thrown the election to Joe Biden.  Wolf resisted the demand from Giuliani, telling him the department had no authority to seize voting machines.  (A similar proposal was made to get the Department of Defense to seize voting machines and “rerun the election” under control of the Army.  That proposal went nowhere when White House Counsel Pat Cippollone blew up the December 18 Oval Office meeting where the proposal was floated.)

The Department of Homeland Security was consulted by the Pentagon at 1:40 p.m. on January 6, 30 minutes after the first breach of the Capitol building.  The DHS National Operations Center sent an email to top Pentagon officials saying “there are no major incidents of illegal activity at this time.”  So the 1/6 Committee might be interested in text messages from or to Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli around that time, when clearly false information was sent to the Pentagon office in charge of the National Guard’s quick reaction force that would not be called out until after 5 p.m. that day.

Then there is the matter of the DHS Security Intelligence Division.  Three separate offices within the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis had collected intelligence that identified specific threats against the Capitol building and failed to share that information with the Metropolitan or Capitol Police until two days after the assault on the Capitol. A report from the DHS Office of Inspector General found that intelligence was improperly shared within the three divisions inside the Security Intelligence Division, and because of that, DHS “was unable to provide its many state, local and Federal partners with timely, actionable and predictive intelligence,” the Inspector General said. 

The Department of Homeland Security Intelligence Division is the only intelligence-gathering agency in the entire government which is required by law to share its intelligence with state, local and other federal agencies. 

So the Department of Homeland Security, which during the summer of 2020 had fielded an armed security force to back-up the Metropolitan Police during demonstrations against the killing of George Floyd, sat on its collective hands and did nothing on January 6.  I’m sure the 1/6 Committee is interested in the text messages that went flying around inside DHS during those days and hours.

There is one other possibility for text messages on the phones of Wolf and Cuccinelli on January 6. It is possible that they communicated with each other during the 187 minutes when Trump and his administration were doing absolutely nothing about the assault on the Capitol.  It has been revealed that numerous officials including members of Congress had asked Trump to call off the rioters in phone calls either directly to him or to his chief of staff Mark Meadows.  As the 1/6 Committee established, Trump did not pick up the phone and call the FBI, the DHS, the DOJ, the Pentagon – in fact any agency of government he could have used to quell the riots.  It would be interesting to see if there were text messages from Wolf or Cuccinelli to each other or to officials in the DHS Security Division about whether or not they should, in the words that have become immortal since the 6th of January, 2020, “do something.”

Wolf has claimed that he turned in his government cell phone on January 20 when he left his position at DHS and it had all its data at that time, so anything done with it after that wasn’t his fault.  He doesn’t have any reason to lie about that because his cell phone data, including records of the calls he made and texts he sent on January 6 are gone. 

It remains a mystery why the Department of Homeland Security would decide to “reset” all department phones in the days immediately following January 20, when appointees of Joe Biden were first trying to find their offices in the department’s gigantic building in Washington D.C.

Unless of course they were simply covering up for the abject failure of DHS to “do something” on January 6 and in the weeks and months before, when they apparently were aware of plans by groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to attack the Capitol.