The Secret Service’s destruction of the texts related to Jan. 6th isn’t just a failure of standard practices—it may well be a crime.

In a letter sent last week to the attorney general and the director of the FBI, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) requested that the DOJ and the FBI investigate whether individuals at the Secret Service violated federal criminal law by willfully destroying text messages after receiving a request to produce them from the DHS OIG.

The CREW letter states that “there can be no question that the Secret Service was required to preserve text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021” under the provisions of the Federal Records Act. CREW calls for an investigation of whether the service’s destruction of the texts violated that law.

But that’s just the beginning. The CREW letter also points to violations of federal criminal law. 18 U.S.C. § 2071 makes it a crime—one punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment of “not more than three years”—to deprive the government of the use of its documents by, among other methods, their destruction or removal. And 18 U.S.C. § 1361 provides that anyone who “willfully injures or commits any depredation against any property of the United States” whose value exceeds $1,000 shall be punished by a fine and/or imprisonment for not more than 10 years. (For property that does not exceed $1,000, the statute provides for a fine and/or imprisonment for not more than one year.)