Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner is calling for a “criminal investigation” into the U.S. Secret Service‘s deleted text messages, revealing that the agency’s forensic experts are “even better than” the FBI’s Quantico lab at retrieving data like deleted text messages.
“I am not fully buying an innocent explanation,” Kirschner, who was a federal prosecutor for nearly three decades, told Zerlina Maxwell on her MSNBC on Peacock show Wednesday.
Kirschner notes that “cell phone providers will purge text messages over time,” but says, “what’s gotten me, got me so sort of frustrated and a little bit angry,” is when “I was a federal prosecutor at the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, and we obtained evidence – cell phone evidence, and it looked like the target, the owner of that cell phone had deleted information off of it, you know where we went to have a forensic search and a recovery of deleted information taken from those cell phones? We went to the United States Secret Service Forensic Sciences Division, because they are the premier unit.”
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“I’m going to say even better than the lab down at Quantico, the FBI lab. They are the premier unit that can recover deleted information off of cell phones and computers,” he explains.
“I am hugely concerned these text messages should have been preserved in the first instance. They should be turned over to authorities, whether congressional or law enforcement authorities, they should be backed up. They should still be retrievable.”
“If they did nothing wrong, they should welcome a law enforcement investigation,” Kirschner adds, noting “if they have nothing to be concerned about they should welcome an FBI investigation of how it is that this important, historic evidence was deleted.”
READ MORE: Watchdog to DOJ: Secret Service ‘Likely’ Broke Federal Criminal Law by Deleting Text Messages
On Thursday he added to his commentary, tweeting: “A criminal investigation should be opened into the destruction of this extremely important evidence.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General notified the House and Senate Homeland Security Committees last week that the U.S. Secret Service erased text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, after the OIG specifically requested them.
Wednesday night new reporting from The Washington Post revealed the Inspector General knew as early as February that the texts had been deleted, but did not notify Congress until July.
The U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack subpoenaed the Secret Service for the text messages but the agency handed over only one.
“House investigators also learned that the texts were seemingly lost as part of an agency-wide reset of phones on 27 January 2021,” The Guardian reported Wednesday, “11 days after Congress first requested the communications and two days after agents were reminded to back up their phones.”
Watch Kirschner’s remarks below or at this link:
Image by Ryan Johnson via Flickr and a CC license