Messages exchanged between Secret Service agents would help fill in information about the timeline of the day, and possibly offer further details about Vice President Mike Pence’s reported refusal to leave the Capitol on Jan. 6, despite a Secret Service request to do so.

“I’m not getting in the car,” Pence reportedly said on Jan. 6. “If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off.”

Had he been whisked away, Pence may not have been able to get back to the Capitol to officially certify the election. Some have theorized that the Secret Service was intentionally trying to keep Pence from certifying the votes.

At the time I thought and wrote that to avoid any possible constitutional problems the business of certification should conclude without adjournment on January 6. It did conclude without adjournment but not until 3:40 a.m. on Jan. 7 was Joe Biden certified the next president. I opined without really knowing, and the correct opinion might not be knowable, that the Constitution is not a ass, that if the Capitol was under enemy attack such that Congress and the vice president could not certify the election results on Jan. 6--as it was--I could not reasonably foresee a viable constitutional challenge if certification occurred on a safe other day before Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, but that it sure would be peachy keen if the shootin' match could be wrapped up on the 6th. That is my caveated opinion today and I am glad that the peachy keen option was the one.

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Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig, who wrote a book about the Secret Service, said in an MSNBC appearance last month that Pence and other aides were “incredibly suspicious” of the “palace guards, so to speak, and their alignment with Donald Trump, and whether or not they were pulling the strings if Vice President Pence climbed into that car.”

Ornato in particular was suspected by a top Pence aide as being someone who “would try to whisk Vice President Pence away from the Capitol at a critical moment,” Leonnig said.