I started laughing about halfway through today's Washington Post story about the deletion of Secret Service text messages from the days surrounding the 1/6 insurrection. It took that long to fully appreciate the thesaurus woo of reporters Drew Harwell, Will Oremus and Joseph Menn. Here's a list of the words and phrases they use to describe what happened:
stunned . . . bungled . . . incompetence . . . raised suspicions . . . high degree of skepticism . . . “highly unusual” . . . “ludicrous” . . . “failure of management” . . . just sounds crazy . . . baffling . . . organizational failure . . . failure of policy and governance . . . “a comedy of errors” . . . strange . . . “does sound fishy” . . . an odd choice . . . “more questions than answers”
For the record, it was around the word "baffling" that I finally realized just how many synonyms for "crazy and unbelievable" the writers had been forced to come up with.
Of course, none of them are correct. The proper phrase is "the mass deletion was obviously done deliberately to hide their tracks," but I suppose the Washington Post can't just come out and say that, can they?
POSTSCRIPT: Why am I so sure it was deliberate? Because of this fact pattern:
- All the texts from the two weeks before and after 1/6 were deleted.
- Prior to its "reset," the Secret Service's IT department didn't do a systemwide backup of text messages. They asked individual agents to do it themselves. This is something that goes way beyond incompetence. There's not an IT manager on the planet who would do this unless they literally didn't care if it got done and were only checking a box for legal reasons.
- There's no sign that anyone on the IT staff ever did anything more than send an email with backup instructions. They didn't call agents to walk them through it. They didn't tell agents to email them when they had done the backup. They kept no records of who had confirmed their backups and who hadn't.
- Apparently not one single agent actually followed instructions to perform a backup. Not one.
- Even after 1/6—which should have shook them up a bit—and even after Congress had explicitly asked the Secret Service to preserve information about 1/6, they blithely went ahead with the reset despite the certain knowledge that it would result in the loss of data.
I suppose I could still be wrong about this. I'm not, though.
Is regrettable, I spent a significant portion of my life focusing on peace, studying Noam and Howard and others, Russia has not come through, China is a totalitarian menace, and Saudi Arabia literally murders journalists and then has an American president lobby to give them professional golf, this shit has to stop, we're the big boys, if we don't take action the future is bleak, not even considering the climate change element, which itself is critical.
The American political press/media has never held the Republicans responsible for anything. It's like the opposite of The Clinton Rules.
They aren't going to change that now. They want Trump back.
It's the movie Death Wish, but in DC. With Trump in the lead, & the press as the criminals... but they actually do want to be murdered by the unhinged vigilante.
Most of the secret service like most enforcement types are MAGA sympathizers if not outright MAGAs. They want to make all the mouthy women and darkies who live on their sufferance sit down and shut the fuck up.
We have a Black VP & a Jew Second Gentleman. I honestly think we would be better off replacing their Secret Service detail with the militant wing of ACT UP.
(I would say the Fruit of Islam, except for the whole Jew thing, & Farrakhan being strongly MAGA himself.)
I was flying half-cocked last night, was a little too frustrated to be posting, after reading the news and then Kevin's post. I do not believe and have no evidence suggesting that the Secret Service is politically-motivated, am just disappointed in the lack of competence, professionalism, and respect for public records laws we are witnessing in this case.
Also, war is not inevitable, but it's getting harder (not impossible) to imagine non-dystopian futures at this point. If we're really about liberty, freedom and justice, we need to start acting like it in everything we do, and in all the global systems we help architect. No more cozying up to dictators and thugs, we need to move to total isolation of these actors, who do not take the welfare of the people they rule into much care or consideration.
Domestically, we need to root out the corruption, and one fantastic way to do that would be to sponsor and pass twin constitutional amendments, one for the freedom of information, and the other for the right to privacy. These both should be encoded with the imprimatur of constitutional amendment, and honestly would be pretty popular with people across the political spectrum.
The Secret Service has a very long (decades and decades) SORDID history, just google it.
The Secret Service has a very long, decades and decades, SORDID history, just google it.
Concentrating on the Secret Service is a case of spending too much time ogling trees and not enough time mapping out the forest. Whatever culpability the Secret Service might have for trying to dump the text messages, it was DHS Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari who delivered the coup de grace when he halted all efforts to retrieved the deleted materials in early February when the deletions were first discovered. In actuality he appears to have been willing to hunt the deleted materials according to reporting in the Washington Post, which stated:
"...Cuffari’s office planned to contact all DHS agencies offering to have data specialists help retrieve messages from their phones, according to two government whistleblowers who provided reports to Congress.
But later that month, Cuffari’s office decided it would not collect or review any agency phones, according to three people briefed on the decision."
It isn't hard to figure out what went on there. Cuffari, age wise, is on the wrong side of the digital divide and probably figured that there was no harm in allowing the IT department to spin their wheels trying to hunt up deleted text messages because he didn't understand just how easy it would be to reconstruct a significant number of them just a few weeks after deletion. Once he was informed of the possibility that significant materials could probably be recovered, he changed his mind and sat on it for as long as he could increasing the chances that the data would be largely irretrievable.
The problem is, Cuffari is a trump man and he is still in office. They need to get him out of there and into jail ASAP.