(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) The Defense Department wiped the phones of top departing DOD and Army officials at the end of the Trump administration.
As a result, messages surrounding the Jan. 6 protests are no longer accessible, The Epoch Times reported.
The DOD acknowledged this as a part of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by a non-profit watchdog organization called American Oversight.
The group has been seeking the communications that those officials had with former President Donald Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows or anyone who communicated on their behalf on Jan. 6.
The request was made six days after the protests, and a court filing was made roughly a year later, to which the Army responded:
“When an employee separates from the DOD or Army he or she turns in the government issued phone, and the phone is wiped. For those custodians no longer with the agency, the text messages were not preserved and therefore could not be searched.”
Of course, many Democrats have pointed to this as an obvious sign of deception on part of Trump and the Republicans who served him at the time.
“It’s just astounding to believe that the agency did not understand the importance of preserving its records—particularly [with regards] to the top officials that might have captured: what they were doing when they were doing it, why they were doing, it on that day,” Heather Sawyer, executive director of American Oversight, said.
Democrats are pointing at what they claim is damning evidence, but seem to have forgotten that some similar occurrences took place during the Mueller trials.
The phone of FBI lawyer Lisa Page was claimed to be lost in the midst of the trials, and when it was found, it was reset to the factory settings before it could be checked for records.
All government-issue phones need to be handed into a records specialist before they are returned to factory settings, and Page’s was not the only phone to be wiped in the midst of the trial.
“It is beyond suspicious that all these phones and the evidence they held were accidentally disabled en masse just as the OIG was closing in,” wrote Judicial Watch researcher Chris Farrell.
