Judge orders Trump to update him on unanswered Secret Service subpoena tied to Jan. 6 civil case

Left: President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a rally in Washington, on Jan. 6, 2021 (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin). Right: In this Jan. 6, 2021, file photo violent insurrectionists loyal to President Donald Trump supporters try to break through a police barrier at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. (AP Photo/John Minchillo).

A federal judge overseeing civil litigation brought against Donald Trump by lawmakers and police who endured the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has agreed to give the former president and convicted felon more time to obtain records from the Secret Service and Metropolitan Police Department that have been missing in action since June.

As Law&Crime previously reported, during a status conference in the civil matter in early August before U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, attorneys for Trump and attorneys for the plaintiffs revealed that subpoenas the parties sent to the Secret Service and Washington, D.C.‘s Metropolitan Police Department have gone totally unanswered for over a month.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs told Mehta that the deadline they put for response for their subpoenas sent earlier this year was June 18. Neither the Secret Service or MPD wished to comment to Law&Crime.

Mehta had told the parties he would reach out to the D.C. Attorney General’s Office to determine whether the subpoenas were lost in the mail or if the agencies were being nonresponsive, but on Tuesday Mehta put the ball squarely back in Trump’s court and asked him to give an update in a little over a week.

“Defendant Trump shall file a Status Report by August 29, 2024, which updates the court on his efforts to obtain records from the Secret Service and the DC Metropolitan Police Department,” Mehta ordered.

The judge, a onetime public defender appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama, has had this case on his docket for a little over three years and he plainly told attorneys during the early August status conference that he was intent on hearing summary judgment arguments before the fall.

The lawsuit is a consolidated case known as Lee v. Trump, and as Law&Crime has reported, it stems from a complaint made by lawmaker plaintiffs Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the former chairman of the now-defunct House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol, as well as lead plaintiff Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., and nine other current or former House members. In addition to Trump, the Lee-led plaintiffs have named the since-dissolved Proud Boys organization and its imprisoned leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, as the former president’s co-defendant.

The plaintiffs say Trump’s use of intimidation in the run-up to and on Jan. 6 was not part of his official role as president and that this conduct impeded them from discharging their duties.

Notably, the Secret Service was one of many agencies sued in 2022 by the federal watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, when it was revealed that a trove of Jan. 6-related text messages were potentially deleted without authorization after the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol requested them.

As Law&Crime reported, the group obtained hundreds of pages of text messages from Department of Homeland Security in March.

The Secret Service has denied any wrongdoing or improper destruction of the texts in question and instead has said that the deletions were the result of a systemwide “migration” that unfolded from Jan. 27, 2021, to April 1, 2021.

Specifically what Trump or the plaintiffs in the Jan. 6 civil case seek with their still-unanswered subpoenas is unclear, but attorneys for the plaintiffs and Trump alike revealed that much of the discovery in the case is publicly sourced.

During an Aug. 7 status conference, attorneys for the National Archives in attendance said their agency has produced 1,500 of 4,700 total documents flagged in the case.

Those records pertain to Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse, official communication between government officials about that rally, the logistics for how Trump got to the Ellipse and left, and communications about his speech.

Federal prosecutors meanwhile said that they had received about 1,650 pages of records from the Interior Department and that the department was on track to finish production by Aug. 19.

Neither party expressed any concern over privilege issues.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs and defendant did not immediately return a request for comment to Law&Crime on Wednesday.