(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Towards the tail end of Monday’s congressional hearing into the Trump assassination attempt, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle said her agency doesn’t have recordings of radio communications from that fateful July 13 event.
Cheatle made that astonishing claim in response to questions from Rep. Russell Fry, R-SC, who asked whether the Secret Service records communications between security details. She also said that radio comms are sometimes recorded—“depending on the detail.”
However, “we do not have radio communications from that day,” Cheatle said of the July 13 Trump rally, which resulted in the near death of presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, the death of a firefighter, and the hospitalization of at least two others.
Criminal.
Cheatle admits USSS does not have radio comms recordings from July 13.
Unbelievable pic.twitter.com/ps7fpzMFzD
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) July 22, 2024
Cheatle did say that the Secret Service has texts and emails from July 13.
The Secret Service is the same agency that deleted text messages related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill uprising.
In the case of Jan. 6, the Secret Service claimed inability to extract text message content due to an April 2021 mobile phone system migration, which wiped all data.
However, the Secret Service then tried to hide the fact that texts were deleted. Even Homeland Security’s own inspector general tried to conceal the fact that the Secret Service—which is housed within DHS—deleted the texts, according to the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO.
“On April 1, attorneys working in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General approved five detailed paragraphs of language that would have alerted Congress to the Secret Service’s deletion of texts related to January 6,” POGO reported in August 2022.
“Yet Inspector General Joseph Cuffari never sent this detailed alert. Instead, the records show that Cuffari not only failed to alert Congress in a timely way about the erased texts, but failed to adopt his staff’s explicit recommendations that he do so.”
The same DHS inspector general is now leading an internal review of the security failures associated with the July 13 event.
Meanwhile, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have called on Cheatle to resign.
Cheatle has insisted that she’s the best person for the job. She’s set to be grilled again by lawmakers Tuesday at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
