Aerial view of the United States military headquarters, the Pentagon.
Jason Reed | Reuters
Text messages received and sent by top Pentagon officials who were part of the Trump administration on Jan. 6, 2021, have been wiped from their government-issued phones, the Defense Department revealed in a court filing.
The text messages from that day, the same day that a mob of Trump supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol, “were not preserved, and therefore could not be searched,” the Defense Department said in that filing.
The filing was made in March.
But it came to light Tuesday as the watchdog group American Oversight asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to open an investigation into the Pentagon’s “failure to preserve the communications, which included those of former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, from Jan. 6,” the group said.
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