and raises all sorts of questions. do you know whose name is on that email, from whom it was sent? we don t know whose name is on the email. we know it was sent by a communication system that connects the department of homeland security to dod. this system exists so dhs can regularly give dod updates on what it s seeing happening around the country. and these updates from dhs were going out every couple of hours over the course of january 6. i don t know if there s a particular individual at dhs who was responsible for writing that update. but from the emails we have, we do know that the update itself was circulated at very senior levels within the pentagon. we have the names of very senior pentagon officials who got that update in their in boxes, claiming everything was fine when in fact there was this awful violence unfolding. gob smacking is exactly the way to describe that one. let me get to one more piece of reporting you have about a covert ops program by the u.s.
postal service that swung into action in the days following january 6. what can you tell us about that? this is also a fun one. the fact that the postal service has a covert operations program. right? it s called the internet covert operations program or icop. i cover law enforcement, i wasn t even aware of the fact that this secret ops program exists in the postal service. in the days after january 6, analysts and versions were looking for ways to get access to social media postings that had been disappeared. many of the conversations leading up to january 6 by extremists happened on a social media platform called parler. the major internet companies moved to basically take parler offline. the problem that presented for investigators is suddenly there was all this potential evidence of crimes that they had trouble getting to. this is where the postal service s covert ops program