The Washington Post reports that text messages from two Trump lackeys, the unlawful Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and his acting deputy secretary, Ken Cuccinelli, are missing, adding to the apparent cover-up by senior administration officials to protect their asses.
According to the department, the text messages from the weeks leading up to the January 6th Republican terrorist attack on Congress were lost during a January 2021 “reset” of the phones after the pair left the government when Joe Biden was lawfully sworn in to be the 46th President of the United States. The department’s Inspector General learned the messages were erased in late February.
Along with Wolf’s and Cuccinelli’s texts, a third person–undersecretary of management Randolph “Tex” Alles, a former Secret Service official–had his texts erased.
The loss of text messages to the two top DHS officials makes it harder for investigators from the Department of Justice and the House Select Committee investigating the Republican attack to track the effort of the Trump cabal to overturn the results of the November 2020 election. Trump reportedly wanted to order DHS to seize voting machines in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona, an unprecedented move that would have immediately caused a Constitutional crisis because the Constitution is very clear that states administer their own election processes.