Congress informed the Secret Service it needed to preserve and produce documents related to January 6 on January 16, 2021, and again on January 25, 2021, for four different committees who were investigating what happened, according to the source. The Secret Service migration did not start until the January 27, 2021.

“Nobody along the way stopped and thought, well, maybe we shouldn’t do the migration of data and of the devices until we are able to fulfill these four requests from Congress,” said Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida, a committee member, in an interview on MSNBC. “The process as explained to us was simply to leave it to the agent to determine whether or not there was anything on their phones worth saving that was necessary to save for federal records.”

Separately, a source familiar with the matter told CNN that employees were instructed twice to back up their phones.

Secret Service employees were told in December 2020 and again in January 202 that if they were going to back up their phones, they’d need to do it manually, a source familiar told CNN. The source said employees were given instructions on how to do the manual backup.