Pentagon Wiped Jan. 6 Texts From Phones Belonging to Top Military Generals, Court Docs Reveal

News that texts between high-level generals can’t be located come as Democrats seek to portray the post-office deletion of messages from a number of influential Trump administration officials’ phones as a conspiracy headed up by the former president–but the DoJ says it’s standard practice.

Text messages exchanged among top US military generals during the January 6 Capitol riot were wiped by the Department of Defense (DoD), newly released court filings have revealed.

Court documents have shown the Pentagon wiped the phones of former Trump administration officials including ex-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, ex-army secretary Ryan McCarthy, and Miller’s former chief of staff, Kashyap Patel, after they resigned on January 20, 2021.

Lawyers for the Department of Justice say such a turn of events is normal, and that after leaving their job, a government employee generally “turns in the government-issued phone, and the phone is wiped.”

“Although it is possible that particular text messages could have been saved into other records systems such as email,” messages between former DoD employees “were not preserved and therefore could not be searched,” they say.

Nonetheless, Heather Sawyer, the director of American Oversight, the group responsible for the Freedom of Information Act request which unearthed the information, urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to open a “cross-agency investigation” into what they described as a “possible destruction of federal records.”

Text messages sent and received by top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials, like acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli, and acting Under Secretary for Management Randolph D. “Tex” Allen have also vanished, it was reported last week.

Emails released by lawmakers on the House Committee on Homeland Security this week indicate the DHS abandoned its attempts to recover missing messages from Secret Service agents involved in the events of January 6 as well.

The preservation of government communications has been a longstanding issue in Washington. In 2016, former US President Donald Trump repeatedly bashed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton over her deletion of over 33,000 emails from a private server she used as secretary of state under then-President Barack Obama.