the lead starts right now. new witness tran scripts released from the january 6th committee, including one from donald trump s own son, and an unusual request from one sitting gop senator. then, officials are calling it the largest russian missile strike since the war began. ukrainians say it could have been so much worse. plus, some signs of relief on the horizon for tens of thousands of southwest pas passengers who have been stuck in the airline s meltdown for now eight days. welcome to the lead, i m phil mattingly. and we begin with our politics lead and new insight into the january 6th investigation. the committee released more testimony transcripts from 19 witnesses, including trump s son donald trump jr., trump attorney christina bobb, kimberly guilfoyle, stephen miller and former white house press secretary stephanie grisham. there s one key thing that sticks out, and that s the role of mark meadows. he was, of course, trump s chief of staff on january 6th an
the secret service certainly has more explaining to do. the department of homeland security, which houses the secret service, really needs to take more of a leadership role in helping to manage this response to congress and get to the bottom of what has happened to these messages. i think congressional overseers at this point but they really need to start asking from the secret service and from dhs is whether the steps that they are taking to determine first of all, whether any of these messages are still recover -able. i think i am holding out, don, that there is still a possibility that this agency will be able to turn up more of these messages. let s not forget, the secret service is a law enforcement agency. it is an investigative agency. and a half substantial forensic capabilities. so recovering messages, investigating what happened here, it actually is something that they are quite capable of doing and congress needs to really press in terms of what are the steps the
but this source says that it was january 27th, after the request. what do you think of that discrepancy? they clearly have some explaining to do here. the secret service certainly has nor explaining to do. and the department of homeland security, which houses the secret service, really needs to take more of a leadership role in helping to manage this response to congress and get to the bottom of what has happened to these messages. i think congressional overseers at this point, what they really need to start asking from the secret service and from dhs is what are the steps that they are taking to determine first of all whether any of these messages are still recoverable. i think i am holding out, don, that there is still a possibility that this agency will be able to turn up more of these messages. let s not forget the secret service is a law enforcement agency. it is an investigative agency, and it has substantial forensic capabilities. so recovering messages, investigatin
for you, you read the transcripts and throughout, you hear, or you see, i don t know, or, i can t recall. and i think one of the questions i have, look, this is a congressional investigation, obviously there is a federal investigation going on, as well. are those are the type of answers that investigators would say, let s dive into this deeper? they would. that s not necessarily the end of the analysis. what you can do, you can try to corroborate what actually went on. you can look to documentary records, you can look to emails, you can look to texts, if they exist. and you can talk to other witnesses that might be able to place a particular witness in a meeting or in an exchange where something like this was discussed. someone saying i don t know can be frustrating, but by no means does it shut down the investigation or close that avenue of analysis. every single one of these transcripts always seems to come back to mark meadows.
stuff, and why wasn t it preserved? and who directed this operation of getting rid of these texts, and why did they do it? and can this be recovered now, because i think as most people know, just because you hit delete on an email or delete a text doesn t mean it s gone forever. it sometimes can be recovered. and that is an operation that i expect the january 6th committee and possibly the fbi will want to be doing because these texts are very important. this is perhaps some of the most important documentary records of what donald trump was doing on january 5th and 6th because the secret service agents obviously were with him all that time. there s got to be relevant information in those texts. and the idea that one text exchange out of 24 people over two critical days, it s just preposterous that that s all that remains.