On Monday, jury selection will begin in the trial of Steve Bannon, a one-time adviser to former President Donald Trump, while the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 congressional rioting said it expects to obtain deleted Secret Service text communications from the 5th and 6th of January by Tuesday.
Mr Bannon, who has been charged with two counts of criminal contempt of Congress, is accused of ignoring a house committee’s demand for his papers and testimony.
The former White House senior strategist from the Trump administration will testify after refusing to participate in the trial with the House committee investigating the Capitol insurgency for months.
This comes just after his lawyer, Robert Costello, stated that Mr Bannon’s position had shifted due to Mr Trump’s withdrawal of his executive privilege claim, which had prevented him from testifying.
Each accusation levelled against the 68-year-old carries a minimum of 30 days in prison and a maximum of a year in prison.
The committee is also set to receive the deleted text exchange between the US Secret Service on Tuesday, as chairman Bennie Thompson stated that a subpoena for these records of “text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, that were reportedly erased and reiterated three previous requests from congressional committees for information” has been issued.
The text conversations were wiped as part of a “device-replacement program,” according to Mr Thompson’s statement, citing the US Secret Service.
The Secret Service “began to reset its mobile phones to factory settings as part of a pre-planned three-month system migration,” according to the statement, and “data resident on certain phones was lost” during that process.
However, the US Secret Service stated that none of the texts sought by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General was lost during the migration activity, as the chairman mentioned in his statement.
“As a result, the select committee demands the relevant text messages, as well as any after-action reports that have been issued in any and all divisions of the USSS related or relating in any manner to the events of January 6, 2021,” the committee chief stated.
The committee will also deliver testimony from new witnesses at Thursday’s public session, according to committee members on Sunday.
This comes shortly after the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security informed the panel and lawmakers that many of the texts were erased as part of the device replacement program, even though the inspector general had requested them as part of his investigation into the events leading up to the Capitol riots.
The Secret Service has disputed the inspector general’s conclusions, claiming that data on some phones was “lost” as part of the referenced system migration in January last year, but that this was unrelated to the ongoing investigation.
The exercise had already begun when the inspector general notified the USSS. According to the USSS, text messages were not “maliciously” deleted.
Furthermore, committee members have stated that the prime-time hearing on Thursday will provide the most persuasive evidence yet of Mr Trump’s “dereliction of duty” on the day of insurrection on January 6.
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The additional witnesses are anticipated to discuss the former president’s failure to manage the enraged mob that stormed the Capitol building, resulting in historical rioting.
Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a member of the House committee investigating the violence, who will co-chair Thursday’s session with Rep Elaine Luria of Virginia, said, “This is going to open people’s minds in a big way.”
“The president did nothing,” he remarked.
