Too much is happening all at once. It’s hard to keep up.

This week CNN reported, “The Defense Department wiped the phones of top departing DOD and Army officials at the end of the Trump administration, deleting any texts from key witnesses to events surrounding the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, according to court filings.”

The departing officials included former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, former chief of staff Kash Patel, and former Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy. It doesn’t sound as if these people deleted anything from their government-issued phones when they left the DoD; rather, the DoD wiped the phones without making backups first when they were turned in, the article says.

But I do remember that Miller and Patel were part of the plan to replace as many key officials as possible with Trump loyalists in the closing days of the Trump Administration. Miller was acting SecDef from November 9, 2020 to January 20, 2021. He replaced Mark Esper, whom Trump fired on November 9. This was just two days after the 2020 election had been called for Joe Biden. Shortly after that, Kash Patel was named Miller’s chief of staff.

By then, the fake elector plot already was taking shape. (McCarthy was Secretary of the Army from September 2019 to January 20, 2021, so his appointment probably wasn’t connected to the election overturning scheme.)

Note also that both Miller and Patel were accused of blocking cooperation with the Biden transition team.

Also, “Miller, Patel and McCarthy have all been viewed as crucial witnesses for understanding government’s response to the January 6 Capitol assault and former President Donald Trump’s reaction to the breach. All three were involved in the Defense Department’s response to sending National Guard troops to the US Capitol as the riot was unfolding,” CNN reported. This is a part of the January 6 picture that hasn’t been much addressed so far.

A few days ago it was reported that text messages of acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli were missing also. You might remember Chad Wolf’s unconstitutional activities in Portland, summer 2020.

And now Cuccinelli has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury regarding January 6. Cuccinelli strikes me as a guy who would like to just walk away from the mess that is Trump. He’d probably rather not denounce Trump, but I doubt he’s going to take any bullets for him, either.

I’m looking forward to the second season of the January 6 committee hearings. It could be even better than the first season.

Much hilarity ensued yesterday at Alex Jones’s trial when it was revealed Jones’s lawyer accidentally had sent all of his text messages to the prosecuting attorneys. It amounted to several hundred gigabytes of material that revealed a lot of deceptions and withholding of evidence on Jones’s part.

Jones is so screwed. His attorney asked for a mistrial this morning; the judge promptly denied it. This judge is all out of bleeps, I believe. For more on that, see Alex Jones Can’t Pretend His Way Out of This Reality by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic.

Update: The January 6 committee wants Alex Jones’s texts.

In other news — the Senate voted to allow Sweden and Finland to join NATO. This was a near-unanimous vote. The only holdout was Josh Hawley, who says we can’t waste time on NATO because China is bad. Yeah, he just wanted to draw attention to himself. Before the vote Mitch McConnell addressed the senators and basically advised them that voting against the admissions would be an extremely stupid move, and I guess everybody but Hawley heard him.