The House committee investigating the assault on the U.S. Capitol has subpoenaed records from the Secret Service after being told by a government inspector general that the agency wasn’t cooperating with the inquiry.

Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chairman, said in a statement on Friday night that the subpoena was issued after the panel heard that Secret Service text messages from Jan. 6, 2021, when the attack occurred, and the next before had been erased.

In the statement and in a separate letter to Secret Service Director James Murray, Thompson wrote that the committee had been told that data on some phones had been lost because of an agency "device replacement program.” He added, however, that "according to the USSS statement, ‘none of the texts it (the DHS Office of Inspector General) was seeking had been lost in the migration.’”

"Accordingly,” Thompson said, "the Select Committee seeks the relevant text messages, as well as any after action reports that have been issued in any and all divisions of the USSS pertaining or relating in any way to the events of Jan. 6, 2021.”

Earlier in the day, the panel met with representatives of the Homeland Security Department’s Office of Inspector General, who said the Secret Service wasn’t cooperating.

The inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, said in a letter to the committee on Wednesday that texts from Secret Service agents on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021 were reported lost during an equipment replacement after his office asked for them as part of its investigation of the Capitol assault.

Representatives of the Secret Service, which is a unit of Homeland Security, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment late Friday night on the subpoena. Earlier, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi declined to comment, saying he would need more information about what, specifically, the inspector general meant in saying the agency wasn’t being cooperative.

The Inspector General’s office did not respond to a request for comment made earlier Friday.

The release of Cuffari’s letter to the committee drew an angry reply from the Secret Service Thursday night. "The insinuation that the Secret Service maliciously deleted text messages following a request is false,” the agency said in a statement.

Some data was lost when the agency had begun to reset its mobile phones to factory settings in January 2021, before the Inspector General’s inspection began the next month, according to the statement.

Some of the most riveting testimony from the Jan. 6 panel’s televised hearings concerned then-President Donald Trump’s actions after he addressed a rally near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021. A former aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, said she was told Trump wanted to join the mob then marching on the Capitol but was blocked by his security detail.

The texts could provide insight into that episode as well as security concerns surrounding then-Vice President Mike Pence, who had gone to the Capitol to preside over the Electoral College certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

Panel members said there’s a possibility some of the texts could still be recovered.

"There have been contradictory statements about whether or not they’re gone,” said panel member Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat. "I’m no expert on the technical side of this, but there are people who have said that, you know, even texts that have been deleted can be recovered in some way. So it depends on the technology, depends on when it happened, and so on.”

Thompson confirmed that the committee would hold a prime-time hearing on Thursday at 8 p.m., the second in the series of televised hearings held this month and last.