No additional US Secret Service text messages from the time of the US Capitol riot were provided by the agency to the Congress on Tuesday.
In response to a January 6 Committee subpoena, the Secret Service confirmed that the messages the committee members were keen to obtain were deleted when the agency phones were moved to a new system, AP notes.
During an interview with MSNBC, Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy revealed that the committee had been provided with "lot of documents and some data" by the Secret Service, but not with the text messages in question.
"They moved ahead with their efforts to migrate the devices and the data, and their process, as explained to us, was simply to leave it to the agent to determine whether or not there was anything on their phones worth saving that was necessary to save for federal records," Murphy said. "And as a result, today they did not receive any texts from their agents when they made that transition that was flagged for preservation."
She noted that the Secret Service said they are going to check “if there are other ways in which they can secure the required and subpoenaed text messages” the January 6 Committee is seeking.
"My hope certainly is that they do find a way to find those texts and respond to the subpoena," Murphy added.
The development comes as the US National Archives requested the Secret Service to investigate the “the potential unauthorized deletion” of the text messages, and to report back within 30 days, according to AP.