“Once is happenstance,” Ian Fleming’s Auric Goldfinger tells the spy James Bond in the eponymous novel. “Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.” Last month, the public learned that the Secret Service had deleted, or negligently allowed the deletion of, texts surrounding the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Last week, The Washington Post reported that texts for top officials then in the Department of Homeland Security, including Acting Secretary Chad Wolf and his deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, are also missing. And yesterday, CNN reported that, according to court filings, the Pentagon wiped the phones of top defense officials, including messages from that day. The old cliché goes that the cover-up, not the crime, is what gets people in trouble. In this case, the actual crime remains the most important and dangerous thing: Donald Trump’s failed months-long attempt to steal the presidency via legal machinations and then his last, desperate attempt to foment a riot that would achieve the same thing. Yet nearly two years later, the public keeps learning horrifying new bits of information. If the actions of Trump and his cronies—especially those outside the government, such as Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell—have become clearer, some of the remaining questions concern what public officials were doing.
The revelations of the string of deletions raises the specter that these agencies were not merely complacent but actually complicit. Some of the officials whose texts were deleted, like Secret Service agents, were civil servants, but others were political appointees, although they also held positions that were not meant to be involved in electoral politics and they had taken an oath to defend the Constitution. Did the deleted texts suggest sympathy with the mob? Or were they so critical of the president that the relevant agencies were afraid of attacks from Trump and his allies should the contents ever come to light? Who was responsible for the deletions, and when? Was Trump himself involved in any cover-up? Even with all these mysteries, the deletions correspond to Trump’s attempt to enlist essential government departments, such as the Pentagon and the Secret Service, into his political schemes. Even as new revelations continue, Trump makes plans for what he’ll do if he returns to office in 2025. In July, Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported on a plan to further subvert the executive branch and turn it into a political operation. If you like the current situation, where we may never know what top public officials were doing and saying while a mob descended on the Capitol, and why, you’re going to love the second Trump presidency.
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