The textual content messages at difficulty might have been deleted when the company performed an information migration of telephones that started January 27, 2021. In keeping with a letter despatched from the Secret Service to the Home choose committee investigating the riot, which has additionally sought messages round January 6 from the Secret Service, the inspector basic requested for data from the 24 personnel in June 2021 — greater than two months after the migration had been accomplished.

Members of the Home choose committee have careworn their perception the company ought to have finished extra to protect data previous to the migration, citing a January 16, 2021, letter from congressional committees to a number of businesses, together with the FBI and the Division of Homeland Safety Workplace of Intelligence and Evaluation, instructing them to protect data associated to January 6.

An appendix to that letter instructed the pinnacle of the intelligence an evaluation workplace, Joe Maher, to flow into that request amongst related DHS parts, which might, in concept, embrace the Secret Service.

Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, instructed CNN the company performed an eight-hour search Thursday of assorted inner message programs to attempt to decide if the January 16 request was despatched to the Secret Service. No report of that letter ever reached the Secret Service, he mentioned.

Engel and Giebels didn’t reply to CNN requests for remark.

Earlier than the inspector basic’s letter this week, the Secret Service had instructed the Home January 6 committee that it was engaged in “intensive efforts” to find out whether or not any messages have been misplaced and in the event that they have been recoverable, together with pulling metadata and interviewing the 24 company personnel.