Olivia Troye, former Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Department adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence, said Friday there was a reason she had “made it very public” about her intention to quitting his job in 2020 – and suggested that ongoing investigations into the missing Secret Service text messages involve the same person.
Troye appeared on CNN as part of a panel alongside former CIA agent Phil Mudd and government ethics expert Norm Eisen when she made the claims. News anchor Jim Sciutto asked Troye why the missing posts, which are linked to the January 6, 2021, uprising, were not actively preserved.
“It’s a little surprising,” Troye said. “I’ve worked on technical migrations in government, and I find it a bit confusing that people didn’t know these messages were going to go away, especially with the amount of planning that goes into these migrations. I can tell you that from first hand after doing it.
“I’m from DHS,” Troye told CNN. “When you work at the top levels of the Trump administration…you know exactly where people’s loyalty goes. I know [Ken] Cuccinelli and Chad Wolf and all those people and Cuffari very well. (Cuccinelli and Wolf were acting leaders of DHS at the time.)
Cuffari notably waited more than a year to report missing messages to the House committee on January 6. However, he first learned of the messages in May 2021 – seven months before alerting them, according to CNN.
Troye, who left the Trump administration in 2020 due to its lack of response to the COVID-19 pandemic, later linked that experience to the DHS inspector general’s office — which was headed by Cuffari at the time.
“There’s a reason I’ve expressed my concerns about the Trump administration very publicly, rather than going through the traditional whistleblower process, which would have taken me through the office of the DHS Inspector General.” , Troye said Friday on CNN.
“And I will just say that. So there’s a level of trust there that you understand.
As for the missing messages, the texts were apparently lost when the Secret Service switched devices and migrated to a new internal data system.
A senior forensic analyst in Cuffari’s office had already prepared to retrieve some of the relevant phones when one of the deputies who “reports to Cuffari’s team” emailed investigators on February 18 and ordered them not to move forward, sources told The Washington Post.
“I have to tell you that as a Trump admin, most admins communicated on encrypted signal apps, apps like Signal,” Troye said. “So most of the time these messages were probably disappearing. So…that’s a bit suspicious.
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Troye added: ‘You can either make your phone government – was there an encrypted app on it? Was it on their home phone? In any case, it seems that these messages have gone both ways.
Mudd, a CNN counterterrorism analyst, called the handling of the situation “beyond incompetent.” Mudd joined the CIA in 1985 as an analyst specializing in the Middle East and South Asia during the administration of President Ronald Reagan.
“How can the Inspector General go to Congress now and say you can trust me to conduct ongoing investigations when there are these gaps in your reports? I think the Inspector General needs to go,” Mudd said.
“What was the DHS Chief Information Officer doing?” Mudd added. “If you’re migrating data, the first question you ask yourself for someone who grew up with a manual typewriter is, is that data backed up? Not just because you’re supposed to, but because the law says you have to.
Eisen, a CNN legal analyst, went even further, suggesting that the Justice Department “no doubt” consider stiff penalties for those potentially involved in the alleged negligence — or a potential cover-up on behalf of the administration. Trump.
“How many coincidences are we going to have involving DHS and the Secret Service and these missing messages about the most crucial time our nation has faced in decades?” asked Eisen.
“I mean, it puts a strain on belief,” he added. “We don’t want to prejudge, but [the] The DOJ is no doubt looking closely at some of the federal penalties that can include criminal penalties if we find that it wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t negligence, it wasn’t coincidence after a coincidence – but something intentional was going on here.
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