In the myriad of intrigues surrounding the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has claimed that the Secret Service is declaring that they deleted text messages on January 5th and 6th, according to The Intercept, citing a DHS letter allegedly sent to the kangaroo court known as the “United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.”
The narrative, addressed on July 14th in The Intercept in an article by Ken Klippenstein, is loosely as follows: Donald Trump dispatched the Secret Service to kidnap Vice President Mike Pence in order to prevent him from certifying the election results—thus securing Trump’s violent coup d’état on that day of infamy now known as J6.
Klippenstein writes: “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 Intercept article beefs up the story with some of the allegations from the book, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, which details how Pence supposedly refused to get in the car dispatched to kidnap him, telling the Secret Service, “If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off.”
Klippenstein’s article goes on: “Had Pence entered the vice-presidential limo, he would have been taken to a secure location where he would have been unable to certify the presidential election results, plunging the U.S. into uncharted waters.
” ‘People need to understand that if Pence had listened to the Secret Service and fled the Capitol, this could have turned out a whole lot worse,’ a congressional official not authorized to speak publicly told The Intercept. ‘It could’ve been a successful coup, not just an attempted one.’
“Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the January 6 committee, called Pence’s terse refusal—‘I’m not getting in the car’—the ‘six most chilling words of this entire thing I’ve seen so far.’”
According to Wikipedia, Klippenstein’s career, which focuses on national security matters and corporate controversies, has included stints at The Nation, The Young Turks, and his work has been published in the Daily Beast and Salon. Klippenstein is known as somewhat of a dirty trickster, having previously tricked Trump’s former acting DNI, Richard Grenell, into tweeting well wishes to convicted U.S. Army officer William Calley, allegedly responsible for the My Lai massacre, after Klippenstein claimed that Calley was his own grandfather. Klippenstein also claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald was his grandfather, and tricked Matt Gaetz, Dinesh D’Souza and others into retweeting the claim.
