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us secret service
DHS Inspector General Launches Criminal Probe Into Secret Service Text Deletions
"This is a big deal," said one advocacy group.
Jul 21, 2022
The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General has opened a criminal investigation into the Secret Service's destruction of text messages sent the day of and before the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
"This is to notify you that the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General has an ongoing investigation into the facts and circumstances surrounding the collection and preservation of evidence by the United States Secret Service as it relates to the events of January 6, 2021," DHS Deputy Inspector General Gladys Ayala wrote in a letter to Secret Service Director James Murray on Wednesday night.
"To ensure the integrity of our investigation, the USSS must not engage in any further investigative activities regarding the collection and preservation of the evidence referenced above," the deputy inspector general continued. "This includes immediately refraining from interviewing potential witnesses, collecting devices, or taking any other action that would interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation."
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which filed a complaint earlier this week asking the U.S. Justice Department to launch "an immediate and full investigation into whether Secret Service employees willfully destroyed federal records," welcomed news of the inspector general's criminal probe.
\u201cThis is a big deal https://t.co/3obLnTiyWs\u201d— Citizens for Ethics (@Citizens for Ethics) 1658427549
While the Secret Service has claimed that texts from last January 5 and 6 were erased as "part of a device replacement program," the inspector general has emphasized that the messages were deleted after DHS oversight officials requested them to aid their assessment of the deadly insurrection incited by former President Donald Trump.
The Secret Service acknowledged its receipt of the inspector general's letter, which comes as the House committee investigating the January 6 attack is attempting to recover the agency's missing electronic communications--with limited success so far.
"We have informed the January 6th select committee of the inspector general's request and will conduct a thorough legal review to ensure we are fully cooperative with all oversight efforts and that they do not conflict with each other," the Secret Service said in a statement.
A Secret Service official said the letter "raises some legal complexities," NBC News reported Thursday after speaking with two unnamed sources.
While the inspector general has asked the Secret Service to cease all internal inquires amid the watchdog's criminal probe, the agency also faces a subpoena from the House January 6 committee and a request for information from the National Archives.
According toCNN, which reviewed the letter: "The inspector general wrote that the Secret Service should explain what interviews had already been conducted related to the text messages, along with the 'scope off the questioning, and what, if any, warnings were given to the witness(es).' The inspector general told the Secret Service to respond by Monday."
The results of the inspector general's probe could be referred to federal prosecutors, the outlet noted. The Justice Department declined to comment on the letter's reference to an "ongoing criminal investigation."
The January 6 panel is set to hold a public hearing Thursday at 8:00 pm ET.
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No, Sanders' Secret Service Detail Isn't Costing 'Taxpayers' $38,000 a Day
Jun 21, 2016
Washington Post political reporter John Wagner (6/19/16) reported on Bernie Sanders' continuing Secret Service detail, throwing in a too-clever-by-half talking point that has since gone viral. In "An Expensive Reminder That Sanders Still Hasn't Dropped Out: His Secret Service Detail," Wagner used an eight-year-old stat to provide urgency to his general thesis that Sanders' quixotic campaign is draining us, the good American "taxpayer" of resources:
Such round-the-clock protection can cost taxpayers more than $38,000 a day.
Over the next 48 hours, this tidbit quickly spread across several outlets, providing a good clickbait-friendly fable of Sanders' egoism run expensively amok:
- Taxpayers Are Still Paying for Bernie Sanders' Secret Service Detail - (CBS News, 6/20/16)
- Sanders' Secret Service Detail Costs Taxpayers $38,000 Every Day He Continues His Campaign (Jezebel, 6/20/16)
- Report: Sanders' Secret Service Bill More Than $38,000 a Day (The Hill, 6/19/16)
- Sanders' Refusal to End Campaign Costs Taxpayers $38,000 a Day (Slate, 6/19/16)
- Bernie Sanders' Continuous Campaigning Is Costing Taxpayers $38,000 a Day (AOL.com, 6/20/16)
The Washington Post's Philip Bump and David Weigel both used the same "Sanders is costing the taxpayer $38,000 per day" framing in their respective tweets boosting the story.
The cynicism of the talking point reached a depressing low with this tweet from Clinton surrogate and actress Debra Messing:
How does Messing propose that the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security, given Sanders' authorization to stop protecting him, turn the resulting savings into cash for the purposes of "donating to Orlando families"? She, of course, won't be proposing any such process, because this talking point is based on shallow moralizing, not on an honest assessment of the costs of Sanders' continuing his campaign. Even without the exploitation of the Orlando attack, it's a talking point that doesn't make any sense.
The number the Post reported was frequently used by then-Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan in 2008. From CBS News (4/4/08):
The Secret Service is spending about $38,000 per candidate per day, Sullivan said, and at the height of campaign season later this year expects to spend $44,000 per candidate each day. The agency has protected candidates at more than 1,000 campaign venues and has put 550,000 people through magnetometers and metal detectors, he said.
Notice Sullivan isn't saying the Secret Service is spending $38,000 per candidate in addition to what they would spend anyway. He's only saying it's what they spent per candidate. This, one can assume, includes fixed costs, like labor and infrastructure. Clearly, protecting Sanders also has other costs above fixed ones--like overtime, per diems, travel--but without any context or knowledge of what the $38,000 is about, it's a useless number. Wagner is taking a one-off McStat without explaining how it was arrived at, and using it to mean something much more specific and consequential.
The sleight-of-hand comes from taking a specific budget item and assuming that if it weren't there, the associated costs would disappear rather than be displaced. Wagner does this by saying, "Protection can cost taxpayers more than $38,000 a day," which gives the reader the impression that if Sanders dropped out, "taxpayers" would magically get back $38,000.
Does anyone think the Secret Service is going to fire the exact number of agents assigned to Sanders the day he drops out? Does anyone think the additional vehicles and equipment needed will quickly be pawned off and the money transferred over to Johnny Taxpayer? Does anyone repeating this talking point think that if the Sanders campaign had ended one week ago the US federal government would somehow be $166,000 richer?
Of course not, because anyone understanding how federal budgets work knows that budgets are based on approximates, not line items picked on an as-needed basis. So, even if the claim is true as such--even if the $38,000 is about monies needed beyond the Secret Service's normal course of operation--it still doesn't make any sense. Until the Secret Service asks Congress for additional funds, there is no money being added or taken from their actual budget, and thus no money being added or taken away from "the taxpayer."
The framing ignores this and uses a Grover Norquist-like gimmick of isolating one-off costs as something being taken away from the "taxpayer"--a term with considerable right-wing baggage and whose uniform adoption here by journalists belies their ostensibly neutral motives.
When FAIR contacted the Secret Service for comment on the $38,000 figure, a spokesperson told us, just as they told the Post, that they "do not comment on the details of protection."
This messaging trick has been used against Clinton, too, with stories such as "Investigating Hillary Clinton's Emails Costs As Much As $13,000 A Day" (Vocativ, 3/29/16). In this case, a price tag is presented as though the FBI agents working her case would otherwise be fired if they weren't kept busy with the email probe. But the FBI, like the Secret Service, doesn't have 100 percent labor liquidity, rendering these types of cartoon breakdowns at best misleading and at worst demagogic.
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Clinton Campaign Shuts Down Black Lives Matter Protest
After being given advanced warning of possible protest, a "respectful" closed-door meeting results instead
Aug 12, 2015
After The New Republicpreemptively reported on Tuesday that a small number of Black Lives Matter activists were on their way to a Hillary Clinton campaign stop in Keene, New Hampshire, the potential protest against the leading Democratic presidential candidate never took place because security at the event barred the group from entering.
Instead of having the opportunity to confront Clinton in a public setting--such as those recently faced by candidate Bernie Sanders--the five activists from Massachusetts, including Black Lives Matter Boston founder Daunasia Yancey, were ushered into an overflow room to watch the event and later treated to a closed-door meeting with Clinton to which reporters were not allowed.
According to TNR:
When they arrived at today's Clinton event, which focused on substance abuse and the heroin epidemic, after first sharing their talking points and questions exclusively with the New Republic, the activists found the entrances closed by U.S. Secret Service who said the venue was at capacity. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who was in contact with the five activists, later told the New Republic that the activists were eventually let into an "overflow room." Following the event, Clinton met with the group for about 15 minutes in a private meeting that they claim turned contentious at times, and featured Clinton giving unsolicited advice for the direction of the movement.
The group's remarks and questions varied a bit from the script they prepared, which focused on criminal justice policies Clinton had supported while her husband was president, but not in tone. "I asked specifically about her and her family's involvement in the War on Drugs at home and abroad, and the implications that has had on communities of color and especially black people in terms of white supremacist violence," Yancey told me in an interview after the meeting. "And I wanted to know how she felt about her involvement in those processes."
Asked whether Clinton actually proposed policies in the meeting, Jones said, "Not that I recall, no. In fact, I know that she didn't because she was projecting that what the Black Lives Matter movement needs to do is X,Y, and Z--to which we pushed back [to say] that it is not her place to tell the Black Lives Matter movement or black people what to do, and that the real work doesn't lie in the victim-blaming that that implies. And that was a rift in the conversation." Jones said that the meeting concluded without any aggression, and that the meeting was "respectful."
In a tweet, Black Lives Movement-Boston characterized their failed attempt to protest the event a success because they had "gotten the attention of [Clinton's campaign] staff" and "now they are working with us."
However, in response to that tweet, others were questioning that narrative:
\u201c@BLM_Boston @HillaryClinton You didn't disrupt HRC, sent an advanced post to let them know you were coming! You did nothing! R you serious?!\u201d— Black Lives Matter Boston (@Black Lives Matter Boston) 1439326363
\u201c@BLM_Boston Clarify what you mean by working with you all? How so?\u201d— Black Lives Matter Boston (@Black Lives Matter Boston) 1439326363
@BLM_Boston @HillaryClinton Funny; considering there are literally zero #holluphillary tweets before yours just now. Care to elaborate?
-- james d. pitley (@jamesdpitley)
August 11, 2015\u201c.@HillaryClinton is also working with private prison lobbyists\u2014and taking (lots of) their money. \n@BLM_Boston https://t.co/9rUOwyGgOS\u201d— Black Lives Matter Boston (@Black Lives Matter Boston) 1439326363
In the aftermath of BLM protests against Sanders last month at NetRootsNation, a national gathering of mostly liberal Democratic voices, it was suggested by some critics that while Sanders--the longest-serving Independent in Congress, a self-described socialist, and the most progressive Democratic presidential candidate with a long record of fighting for economic, social, and racial justice--was loudly confronted by activists, Clinton has been noticeably spared (or masterfully avoided) the media spectacle of such confrontations. Going further, Bruce Dixon, co-editor of the Black Agenda Report, argued that what happened at Net Roots had "ominous" implications for some Black Lives Matters activists and the Democratic Party machine:
Last month folks whom [Black Lives Matter co-founder] Alicia Garza described as "part of our team" disrupted two minor white male candidates at NetRootsNation, the annual networking event for paid and wannabe paid Democratic party activists, embarrassing them with demands over structural racism and "say her name". If they were positioning themselves for careers inside the far-flung Democratic party apparatus, it was a smart move, because Hillary wasn't there. Hence they got noticed in that crowd of Democrat operatives without antagonizing the people with the real money and connections.
Strikingly, neither the Clinton campaign nor the Black Lives Matter activists themselves on Tuesday appear to have made strong efforts to have the private meeting covered by the national press gathered at the event. According to CNN:
Initially, the meeting between Clinton and the protesters was going to be covered by pooled members of the media, but Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton's campaign, said the #BlackLivesMatter protesters asked for the event not to be recorded by the media once they were informed journalists would be let in. Members of the media were never in the room with Clinton and the protesters.
A Clinton aide said the protesters asked those in the room to stop recording and photographing during the first moments of their meeting with Clinton. Because of that, the aide said, the campaign did not escort anyone else in after that.
But Yancey cast doubt on the Clinton campaign's reason for journalist not being let in after the event.
"We said that we did not want to take a photo with her," Yancey said. "The only thing that we were asked about was whether we wanted to include photos."
When asked whether they were asked to allow members of the media in, Yancey said, "Nope, we were not asked that."
The #BlackLivesMatter members filmed their meeting with Clinton, however, and plan to put the video out.
As of this writing, the video has yet to be released, though the group, in a tweet, said it would be posted as soon as it's ready.
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