On the menu today: The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General accuses the U.S. Secret Service of erasing text messages from January 5 and January 6, 2021 — after the inspector general requested those records. The Secret Service counters that the messages were deleted as part of a routine, long-planned changeover to a new phone system. Someone’s not telling the truth — and it appears to be another example of the increasingly pervasive, corrosive trend of people prioritizing their personal, short-term desires and needs over the duties of the institutions they supposedly serve.
The People Who Run Our Institutions Should Actually Care about Those Institutions
Back when the draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s Dobbs opinion, overturning Roe v. Wade, leaked, I wrote, “Do you know why the Supreme Court had so few leaks, decade after decade? Because the people who worked there have understood that they had a duty to something more important than their own sense of satisfaction.”
(Still no luck finding the leaker, two and a half months later, huh? As I wrote last month, “the longer the investigation goes on without any conclusion, the more people will suspect that identifying the leaker would compound the damage already done to the Court’s reputation.”)
Another Washington institution that once enjoyed near-universal public respect — in the Court’s case, an almost awe-inspiring mystique around its sterling professionalism — is suffering another scandal after an embarrassing cavalcade of them in recent years. And this one might be even worse than a group of macho men with tough jobs drinking too much or sleeping with prostitutes in Colombia. This one suggests that when push comes to shove, high-ranking officials in a law-enforcement agency will break the law to protect their reputations:
The Secret Service erased text messages from January 5 and January 6, 2021, according to a letter given to the January 6 committee and reviewed by The Intercept. The letter was originally sent by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General to the House and Senate homeland security committees. Though the Secret Service maintains that the text messages were lost as a result of a “device-replacement program,” the letter says the erasure took place shortly after oversight officials requested the agency’s electronic communications. . . .
The Office of Inspector General letter suggests key evidence in the form of the Secret Service’s electronic communications may never see the light of day. The Department of Homeland Security — the Secret Service’s parent agency — is subject to oversight from the DHS Office of Inspector General, which had requested records of electronic communications from the Secret Service between January 5 and January 6, 2021, before being informed that they had been erased. It is unclear from the letter whether all of the messages were deleted or just some. Department officials have also pushed back on the oversight office’s records request by arguing that the records must first undergo review by DHS attorneys, which has delayed the process and left unclear if the Secret Service records would ever be produced, according to the letter.
For what it is worth, Anthony Guglielmi, chief of communications for the U.S. Secret Service, insists this is no scandal, just a case of really unfortunate coincidental timing:
The insinuation that the Secret Service maliciously deleted text messages following a request is false. In fact, the Secret Service has been fully cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) in every respect — whether it be interviews, documents, emails, or texts.
First, in January 2021, before any inspection was opened by OIG on this subject, the Secret Service began to reset its mobile phones to factory settings as part of a pre-planned, three-month system migration. In that process, data resident on some phones was lost.
DHS OIG requested electronic communications for the first time on Feb. 26, 2021, after the migration was well under way. The Secret Service notified DHS OIG of the loss of certain phones’ data, but confirmed to OIG that none of the texts it was seeking had been lost in the migration.
Second, DHS OIG’s allegation regarding DHS’s cooperation with its investigation is neither correct nor new. To the contrary, DHS OIG has previously alleged that its employees were not granted appropriate and timely access to materials due to attorney review. DHS has repeatedly and publicly debunked this allegation, including in response to OIG’s last two semi-annual reports to Congress. It is unclear why OIG is raising this issue again.
It is difficult to believe that no one in the U.S. Secret Service could foresee any need to preserve records surrounding January 6. If the Secret Service had deleted messages from a day when nothing particularly unusual or remarkable happened, it would be easier to accept the explanation that this was a routine update of communications equipment. But the whole country watched the events of January 6, and President Trump had a central role in those events.
If the person who made this decision did so as part of a cover-up of something embarrassing or criminal — Trump’s actions, the Secret Service’s actions or comments — it’s yet another example of the sort of short-term thinking that’s triumphing in Washington. Yes, whatever was in those particular messages will not come to light. But the reputation of the Secret Service suffers even more.
Yuval Levin is arguably the public intellectual who most clearly and succinctly diagnosed one of the paramount maladies of our era: the sense that the people responsible for running large institutions that are supposed to serve the public can no longer distinguish between their personal interests and the institution’s mission. Back in early 2020, speaking to NPR, he laid out what makes an institution a reassuring presence in our lives:
We trust an institution when we think that it forms the people within it to be trustworthy — so that not only does it perform an important social function, educating children or making laws or any of the many, many goods and services that institutions provide for us, but it also at the same time provides an ethic that shapes the people within it to perform that service in a reliable, responsible way.
The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and all the Court’s employees are supposed to be dedicated to the Court’s mission and constitutionally mandated duties of judicial review of U.S. and state laws. They can have strong disagreements about how best to perform those duties and about what the Constitution actually requires. But if you work at the Supreme Court, you’re not supposed to leak drafts and deliberations to launch a public-pressure campaign against the justices. That’s putting what you want ahead of the institution’s mission.
The members of the U.S. Secret Service and all its employees are supposed to be dedicated to the service’s mission of protecting the president and other officials from harm and enforcing U.S. laws. Occasionally, those two missions may appear to be in conflict. Back in 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that U.S. Secret Service employees could be compelled to testify to a grand jury investigating the president they were protecting. Loyalty to the president could not outweigh loyalty to the law; they are not an American Praetorian Guard, loyal to the whims of the man in the Oval Office above all else.
Deleting phone records — allegedly shortly after oversight officials requested them — is putting someone’s personal interest ahead of compliance with the law.
Levin also said this in that 2020 interview:
We have to be able to say people with power have certain obligations — and not just as outsiders watching people in power. All of us have some roles to play within some institutions, even if that’s our family or community or workplace, let alone national institutions and politics and the economy. We each have to say, given my role here, what’s my responsibility? I would bet you that the people who most drive you crazy in American life are people who are failing to ask that question when they obviously should. . . .
As a parent, as a neighbor, as a member of the PTA, as a member of Congress, as a CEO, what should I do in this situation? Not just what do I want, not just what would look good, but given my role here, what should I do? It is a question you ask when you take the institutions that you’re part of seriously.
Earlier this month, Gallup found that “Americans are less confident in major U.S. institutions than they were a year ago, with significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any.” The two of those eleven institutions that saw the biggest declines in public confidence were the Supreme Court and the presidency. Americans had the most confidence in small businesses and the military. Just 14 percent of respondents said they had confidence in the criminal-justice system, just 11 percent in television news, and just 7 percent in Congress.
Sometimes large institutions spring up and grow to massive influence rapidly; tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook come to mind. But by and large, the institutions that impact our daily lives predate our birth: Our churches and faith communities; the federal, state, and local governments; news organizations; banks; police forces; the health-care system overall, if not particular doctors. We didn’t create these institutions; we inherited them. We’re not their owners, we’re their stewards. Someday we’ll retire and then be gone, and we’ll be handing the reins to our literal or metaphorical children. Responsible people want to pass along an institution that is stronger and in better shape than when their older mentors handed them the reins.
Then again, maybe some people are comfortable letting an institution deteriorate on their watch.
ADDENDUM: I’m not saying that the latest musings on when Donald Trump will announce his 2024 bid or the latest efforts by congressional Democrats to persuade Joe Manchin on Build Back Better legislation aren’t newsworthy. But it does feel like those news stories are just another round of speculation in circular dances that have been going on all year.
By contrast, in a Corner post about the economy yesterday, I rattled off a couple of news items that I’d argue are underreported and more consequential:
- Worker shortages are creating problems for construction and infrastructure projects, tampon production (!), pools and summer attractions, and even Independence Day fireworks displays.
- The Atlanta Fed’s projection for GDP growth in the most recently completed quarter is negative 1.2 percent— which would make two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, the traditional definition of a recession.
- Regarding gas prices, our refinery capacity isn’t increasing, and in fact another refinery is scheduled to shut down at the end of 2023, or perhaps even earlier. So that problem isn’t likely to go away anytime soon.
Ever feel like some days, the selection of top headlines is designed to not tell you what’s going on?