Hunt for lost Jan. 6 texts continues

WASHINGTON — The Secret Service has failed so far to provide Congress with any substantial new agency text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, but assures the House committee investigating last year’s Capitol attack it will continue searching for the lost material.

Secret Service Communications Chief Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement Wednesday that thousands of pages of documents, including those on agency mobile phone use and other policies, have been turned over under subpoena to the committee.

Guglielmi previously confirmed that texts sought by the committee were inadvertently lost during an equipment upgrade prior to the inspector general’s request for them.

The agency has been “fully cooperative” with the committee request for those same records, said Guglielmi in his statement, adding it will keep digging and is “taking all feasible steps to identify records, including “forensic examinations of agency phones and other investigative techniques.”

But a committee member, Democrat Zoe Lofgren of California, said during an interview on MSNBC that, from what the committee has received from the agency so far, there is only one new text message that she hadn’t already seen.

And she said that one message, in fact, appeared to have been found through “another branch of government.”

“We did receive thousands of documents … but not ones at the heart of the investigation,” another member on the committee, Democrat Adam Schiff of California, said in a separate MSNBC interview.