At the Aspen Security Forum on Tuesday evening, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas promised that the Secret Service, which is part of his department, would cooperate fully with inquiries from the Jan. 6 committee and others into what happened with the missing text messages. 

Asked by MSNBC correspondent Trymaine Lee whether he believes the texts were deleted by accident, Mayorkas said, “The migration was planned well before January 2021,” referring to a data migration that Secret Service has blamed for the deletions. “I think the facts will be disclosed and we will address the facts as they are learned, or continue to be learned, and we will learn from it.”

The DHS inspector general sent a letter to congressional committees last week informing them that the Secret Service had deleted texts. Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari said he was told that the texts were erased after he requested records of electronic communications tied to the insurrection, “as part of a device-replacement program.”