The January 6 committee announced that the Secret Service has started complying with the subpoena issued last week and is providing records, while the committee’s investigators are taking stock of the information. 

“We have concerns about a system migration that we have been told resulted in the erasure of Secret Service cell phone data”, the committee tweeted. 

The committee further noted that the US Secret Service continued their migration process on January 27, 2021, around three weeks after the insurrection at the Capitol, during which time then Vice President Mike Pence, who was under Secret Service protection, faced danger and was “steps from a violent mob hunting for him”. 

It also noted, “The procedure for preserving content prior to this purge appears to have been contrary to federal records retention requirements and may represent a possible violation of the Federal Records Act”, adding, “The Select Committee is seeking additional Secret Service records as well.”

The Secret Service had earlier said that a system migration led to the deletion of pertinent texts around that time, but many on the Jan 6th Committee Twitter thread have speculated that it reeks of a cover-up, with one saying that this is the 21st century equivalent of “the dog ate my homework”. 

A senior Secret Service official also told NBC that agency employees received two emails, at least one before Jan 6, 2021, reminding them to save records on their cell phones before the devices were essentially restored to factory settings. 

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The first mail came on December 9, 2020, from the Secret Service’s Office of Strategic Planning. The second came in January 2021 from the agency’s chief information officer. NBC didn’t get an exact date from their source for the second message. 

The third came on Feb 4, 2021, asking that all communications pertaining to Jan 6 were to be preserved. Several congressional members had already asked to be made privy to the communication by that time, though at the time of the Jan 6 committee issuing the latest subpoena, a source familiar with the matter had told NBC that the Secret Service doesn’t have additional messages to hand over. 

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However, the tweet from the committee seems to suggest otherwise and the findings from the Secret Service records are likely to come up in the hearings.