Watchdog Informs Secret Service of Criminal Inquiry Into Missing (Secret Service) Texts, reads the NY Times headline. The story begins:

WASHINGTON — The inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security directed the Secret Service to halt its internal search for purged texts sent by agents around the time of Jan. 6 so that it does not “interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation,” according to a letter reviewed by The New York Times.

“To ensure the integrity of our investigation, the U.S.S.S. must not engage in any further investigative activities regarding the collection and preservation of the evidence referenced above,” the Homeland Security Department’s deputy inspector general, Gladys Ayala, wrote to James M. Murray, the director of the Secret Service. “This includes immediately refraining from interviewing potential witnesses, collecting devices or taking any other action that would interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation.”

The Times article makes only the obliquest reference to the Trump appointed DHS Inspector General’s months’ long cover up of the Secret Service’s destruction of evidence, a particularly egregious bit of law-skirting by a federal law enforcement agency bound by law to preserve all records for the federal archives. The popular right-wing British tabloid The Daily Mail had as its sub-headline:

Sources who worked under Trump-appointed Inspector General Joseph Cuffari claim watchdog didn’t report February findings to Congress about the purge.

(the article includes, and emphasizes this damning detail).


Meanwhile, a Washington Post report on Tuesday reveals that the DHS watchdog agency did not alert Congress in February when it learned about the Secret Service purge that deleted nearly all text messages from around January 6, 2021.
Two whistleblowers within the DHS Inspector General’s office told the Post about the previously unreported months-long delay in the watchdog office flagging the erased Secret Service cellphone messages to Congress.

The Grey Lady reported it more succinctly, with characteristic anodyne understatement.

The inspector general, Joseph V. Cuffari, who has for months conducted a review of the Secret Service’s actions on Jan. 6, first raised the issue of the missing texts last week with the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol.

All the news that’s fit to print, I guess (and don’t bother clicking that link, not very enlightening.) The quick Times reference leaves open the suggestion that Mr. Cuffari himself may have only recently discovered the mass deletion of possibly incriminating evidence from Mr Trump’s Secret Service detail, most of whom recently hired private counsel to represent them, now that Trump’s personally loyal bodyguards who innocently permanently deleted their texts from the day before and during the riot are all targets in a criminal probe.

The uniform, reflexive pattern of every single one of Trump’s associates, lackeys and appointees invariably breaking laws, bending rules, burying evidence, abusing descretion, obstructing investigations, delaying required procedures (recall that fucking Bill Barr buried the credible, urgent whistleblower complaint and transcript of Trump’s perfect phone call with Zelensky for a long time after he was legally required to take action on the referral), using government appointments for financial (Jared and Ivanka) or political gain (fucking Wilbur Ross and his maddening bullshit with the Census[1]), dismissing inspectors general, bringing frivolous lawsuits and appeals to dominate the news, harass enemies and run out the clock on accoutability, with quid pro quo pardons, if all else fails. The uniform corruptness of how these motherfuckers operate makes it infuriating that the paper of record remains so opaquely fucking dainty in reporting the facts.

Just sayin’…

[1]

Almost exactly a year ago the DOJ declined to prosecute Wilbur Ross despite a watchdog finding that he made misrepresentations to Congress about adding census citizenship questions. His real purpose in adding that question, of course, which they fought all the way up to the Supreme Court, naturally, was to intimidate minorities from answering the census to reapportion money and political representation (House seats) away from minorities and integrated urban areas and toward white, rural, faithful Republican voting areas. As you do, when you have discretion to abuse and you work for an autocrat.