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What’s the best word to describe the Secret Service’s loss of text messages?

Published on 55 Comments on What’s the best word to describe the Secret Service’s loss of text messages?

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:

  1. All the texts from the two weeks before and after 1/6 were deleted.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Apparently not one single agent actually followed instructions to perform a backup. Not one.
  5. 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.

55 thoughts on “What’s the best word to describe the Secret Service’s loss of text messages?”

    1. akapneogy

      Shades of "Russia, if you are listening ...." Trump has managed to transform about one half of the federal government in his own image. Another term, and he would have finished the job.

  3. different_name

    Even if one were prepared to buy this from the SS, I don't think anyone lacks the self respect to accept the same excuse from Wolf and Cuccinelli.

    Except maybe one of Don's suckers.

  6. Salamander

    Yeah, that all looks totally innocent. As does the Cabinet members deleting all their texts, too. It could happen!

    And re the WaPo article, the words that come to my mind are "criminal", "destruction of evidence", "beyond suspicious", "not coincidental", ...

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      Maybe the Trump regime was relying on superdelegates, & not alternate slates of electors, to retain power.

  7. ronp

    most fed IT is contracted out and it goes to the low cost vendor. so they are bad, I think there is a chance it is incompetence and not deliberate but the committee should be able to find some evidence one way or the other.

    1. Joel

      "I think there is a chance it is incompetence and not deliberate"

      That's hilarious. That chance is roughly the same as the probability of porcine aviation.

      1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

        Also the same odds as Kevin Drum & his SoCal kid brother Conor Friedersdorf defending a leftist from kancellation.

  9. Larry Jones

    Now it turns out that texts from the same time period between Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli (Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and Acting DHS Deputy Secretary) have also gone missing, in case there was any doubt that a conspiracy to cover something up took place.

  10. Larry Jones

    If all Secret Service agents received an email telling them to back up their texts and describing how to do it, are we to believe that not one of them did so? And if even one of them did, maybe the texts can be salvaged. Unless they got a recent phone call telling them to delete their backup...

  12. sonofthereturnofaptidude

    I usually assume that incompetence rather than evil rules when things like this happen, but you're right. Fishy doesn't even begin to describe it. It stinks to high heaven, much as Trump has from the day he became a public figure.

  14. Jimm

    Truly at best keystone cop stuff, which underscores the sheer incompetence at display here, even generously accepting their suggested explanation. No one expects or should expect to find incriminating texts, I hope they wouldn't be that stupid, but whoever is running the agency should be fired, and probably a level below them as well, just to underscore the importance of competence.

  15. Jimm

    This country is turning into a shit show, and it's mainly just rank incompetence, lack of responsibility, and at times just plain stupidity (some if it willful).

    2. KawSunflower

      This isn't the work of incompetent people; it's the behavior of newcomers to the federal government for which they have no respect, encouraged in their goal of deconstructing government by trump, Bannon & their enablers.

      And it wouldn't surprise me if the Secret Service members, some of whom seemed to disrespect Obama but react favorably to trump, see themselves as basically irreplaceable in the short term, so they feel that they can flout the rules with impunity. It's just another way for the right wing to own the libs.

  17. cld

    If all the Secret Service agents were instructed to back up their texts, to what were they backing them up? Some central thing where they could all be dumped at once?

  19. D_Ohrk_E1

    It wasn't until yesterday's revelation that it hit me that we have a much wider criminal conspiracy at work, with a very clear pattern.

    All the things that have gaps or are missing from January 6, 2021:

    - White House call log has a 7 hour gap during the insurrection
    - Presidential daily diary log of the President's daily activities
    - Secret Service call and text logs deleted
    - Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf text and call logs deleted
    - Acting Deputy DHS Secretary Ken Cuccinelli text and call logs deleted

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      The Insurrection is what the GQP claimed the Bill Climpton White House Travel Office was. With a dash of algore's shakedown of Buddhist monks.

  20. ctownwoody

    Don't forget that the Secret Service is also an investigative agency for cybercrimes within the Department of the Treasury, so their agents would have a high degree of tech savvy, plus whatever skills from their anti-counterfitting duties. That's a lot of core competencies that they suddenly and for a limited time only seemed to forget.

  22. bebopman

    Does Joe need an Extra Special Service to protect his back from the Trump fans in the Secret (Texts) Service? I’m only half joking. Hate to sound paranoid, butTrumpy agents allowing Joe to be shot wouldn’t surprise me at this point.

  23. Jimm

    If I were president, I would invite every agent to report to my office directly, on sn individual basis, and explain to me the instruction they got from IT and their leadership, and what they did. I would decide to keep or fire them on the spot, or maybe even think about it a little bit. I would be very inclined to fire the entire leadership in one fell swoop, as the agency has become unforgivably political.

  24. Jimm

    In case you wonder about that last statement relative to "unforgivably political", that is not in the news, and likely won't ever be.

  25. rick_jones

    Conspiracy or no, somehow I suspect a Secret Service agent would consider such mundane things as phone backups as pure overhead.

  26. Jimm

    Now admittedly, if the president is a traitor and fraud, and spreading propaganda about stolen elections without evidence, the Secret Service really is not trained in this respect, as to what to do. But as law enforcement officers they should know to respect the law, including about transparency and disclosure, and if they don't, we have a problem, because this is obviously essential for any public service, let alone a public security service.

  27. Jimm

    In other words, just as a normal citizen, you don't get to pick and choose what laws you follow, and the law is very clear about public record keeping, transparency and disclosures, which is why Secret Service leadership should be fired en masse, because they failed to obey the law, to respect the law, and to maintain the non-political posture we expect from law enforcement.

  28. Jimm

    And aside from all that, just can't trust the competence. IT stuff isn't that hard, unless you want it to be, or you're just lazy, neither acceptable excuses when people were storming the Capitol and conspiring to undermine our election.

  29. Jimm

    If you're excuse is that you're incompetent, when you're in the most elite security service this country has, you should resign before we fire you. And any cursory investigation of how many agents have Signal messaging accounts wouldn't help in this respect either, but if there's any time to call out the bullshit, it's right now when we're on the verge of world war, and our primary adversary is pushing the exact same propaganda as some of our so-called "patriots".

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