How the Secret Service directly witnessed Trump's effort to 'crown himself president again' — and the lost texts could be key

On Friday, MSNBC's Chris Hayes delved deep into the new reporting on further missing text messages within the Trump administration — and the significance of the matter to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

One of the key points, Hayes argued, is that the Secret Service was allegedly a direct witness to former President Donald Trump and his allies as they schemed to overturn the presidential election — and the missing messages are at a crucial point of those events.

"Well, there are even more missing texts," said Hayes. "The Washington Post now reporting that text messages related to January 6 from Donald Trump's acting Secretary of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, and acting Deputy Secretary, Ken Cuccinelli, have vanished. That's in addition to all the Secret Service text messages related to the 6th that have also gone missing. For an ostensibly apolitical organization like the Secret Service, this has become an enormous scandal. And this is the latest in Trump's attempt to overturn the will of voters, to end American democracy."

"The January 6 Committee has provided quite a bit of evidence showing that Trump wanted to use the Secret Service as a personal armed guard," said Hayes. "That he wanted to lead the mob personally to the Capitol, during insurrection, in order to ... disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. And make that the final step and basically crown himself president again. And he wanted the Secret Service to help him. Now we know that Trump was aware of the fact that much of the mob was armed. Trump apparently wanted the Secret Service to remove the metal detectors at the speech on the ellipse, where he incited the riot."

The missing messages, said Hayes, could highlight exactly what key Secret Service officials saw — and many of them appear unwilling to discuss it.

"All this speaks, of course, to how central the Secret Service was to the full picture of Donald Trump's attempted coup," said Hayes. "We know they were deeply involved in tracking, and planning, for both Trump and Pence during, before, and after the insurrection. But despite this, it appears the January 6 committee knows surprisingly little about the Secret Service's internal deliberations from that time. When the agents were doing and saying. Last month, for example, committeemember Congressman Stephanie Murphy from Florida, said that Tony Ornato is a key figure because he served as both a deputy White House chief of operations and head of Trump's Secret Service detail, and was not forthcoming to his testimony with the committee. Especially compared to Mark Meadows aide, Cassidy Hutchinson."

Watch below:

Chris Hayes on Secret Service missing textswww.youtube.com