You Will Anyway: About those Secret Services "missing" texts

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

About those Secret Services "missing" texts

A suit filed in federal court Wednesday seeks to compel the National Archives to seek assistance from the Department of Justice (DOJ) in recovering text messages from both the Secret Service and leadership of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that were apparently lost in days following the 2020 election.

The suit, filed on behalf of Ken Klippenstein, a reporter for The Intercept, turns to a provision of the Federal Records Act that requires the head of the Archives to request assistance from the attorney general if an agency does not act to recover the records.

[...]

“All NARA can really do is ask questions and wag their finger. The FBI and DOJ can subpoena and can compel answers,” [attorney Kel McClanahan] said.

[...]

Lawmakers were notified in July by DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari that the Secret Service had “erased” text messages from Jan. 6, 2021, something the agency said occurred as a result of a migration to a new phone software that took place just weeks after the attack on the Capitol.

Text messages from then-Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and his deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, were also lost in a “reset” of government phones during the transmission to the Biden administration.

Together, the erasures represent a major loss for those reviewing the effort to block the transition of power after the 2020 election, both in terms of reviewing discussions around former President Trump’s movements that day, as well as his efforts to have DHS seize voting machines.

The Hill

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.