Esper downplays missing Jan. 6 texts: ‘We need to let this process play out’

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Wednesday said it was a “normal process” for phones to be wiped during a transition to a new administration, defending new revelations showing former top Pentagon officials erased messages related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Esper told CNN’s “New Day” that the wiped phones should be “looked into” but reiterated it was standard protocol to reset phones and devices during a transition to a new administration.

“The headline is dramatic, but when you dig into it, you find that it’s probably a process that was just executing itself,” Esper said. “I’m not jumping to any conclusions, it needs to be looked into, but my sense is that at the end of the day, it will come out to be a normal process.”

American Oversight, a federal government watchdog group that had filed a public records request for communications between former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, revealed on Tuesday those records were not preserved — so its request could not be fulfilled.

The disclosure follows news that other texts related to the Capitol riot were wiped during the transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration, including messages from the Secret Service and top former officials with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The inspector general at DHS, Joseph Cuffari, notified Congress last month that DHS texts from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, were wiped as part of a device replacement program.

Top Democrats in Congress have asked Cuffari to step down from the investigation into the missing Secret Service texts, alleging he has known since December that the messages had been erased.

The Pentagon texts could have shed light on why the deployment of the National Guard on Jan. 6 was delayed and how Trump officials were communicating during the rioting.

American Oversight requested that Attorney General Merrick Garland investigate the wiped messages, noting they were deleted after a records request was filled.

Esper, who was fired by Trump in November 2020, told CNN on Wednesday that bureaucracy in the Pentagon likely stymied officials who would have received the records request and stopped the erasure before it happened.

“It sometimes takes a piece of paper request weeks, if not months, to get to the people that actually end up doing these things,” he said. “We need to let this process play out.”