Tony Ornato, the former Secret Service official whose work for former President Donald Trump has been under intense scrutiny by the January 6 committee, retired on Monday — potentially complicating one aspect of the panel’s inquiry. His exit was “long-planned,” he said in a statement, adding that he is leaving now to “pursue a career in the private sector.”
“I retired from the U.S. Secret Service after more than 25 years of faithful service to my country, including serving the past five presidents,” Ornato said in a statement to news outlets, explaining that he had been “planning this transition for more than a year.” Ornato ran Trump’s security detail before joining Trump’s White House staff — an unprecedented move — in 2019. He then returned to the Secret Service to run its training program.
Ornato, who has already reportedly met with the committee twice earlier this year, came under renewed attention over the summer when former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson delivered an explosive testimony about Trump’s actions on the day of the January 6 insurrection — including a secondhand account of Trump allegedly lunging at a member of his security team in an attempt to steer the vehicle he was in toward the Capitol where he’d urged supporters to go and “fight” for him. “I’m the fucking president,” Trump allegedly said. “Take me up to the Capitol now.”
Hutchinson said she heard about the incident from Ornato, the deputy chief of staff at the time, and Robert Engel, the head of Trump’s security detail. Anonymous sources told news outlets shortly afterward that Ornato “disputed” her testimony, while Trump and allies sought to cast doubt on her credibility. But members of the January 6 committee defended her: Republican Liz Cheney, the ranking member, told ABC News that investigators were “confident” in her testimony and that the panel would not “stand by and watch her character be assassinated by anonymous sources.” Some members of the committee, including Republican Adam Kinzinger, called Ornato’s own credibility into question.
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The committee — which Politico reports was skeptical of aspects of Ornato’s earlier closed-door testimony, including his claim that Trump did not know then-Vice President Mike Pence was at the Capitol — has sought an additional interview with the former deputy chief of staff, but he has apparently yet to sit down with investigators. (Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesman, told Politico the agency has “continuously made Tony Ornato available.”) As the Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein reports, Ornato is scheduled to appear Wednesday before investigators from the Department of Homeland Security, and has indicated that he still plans to attend. But as a private citizen, investigators won’t have subpoena power over him. That could prove frustrating for investigations by the January 6 panel and the DHS inspector general, which is looking into deleted Secret Service text messages the House select committee had requested. The Secret Service only provided a single text to the DHS watchdog, who opened a criminal investigation into the matter, and says that any other texts related to the January 6 attack were permanently deleted as part of a plan to replace staffers’ phones. The January 6 committee concluded its first series of public hearings on the 2021 attack last month. It has continued its investigation in the back half of the summer and is expected to hold additional hearings in the fall.
