The January 6 Committee disobeyed new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) request from the previous year to keep all of its documents, evidence, as well as transcripts and has since destroyed most of the information it gathered over the course of more than a year of inquiry.
This information was revealed by Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) to Fox News Digital this week. He also pointed out that the committee had not investigated any security issues at the Capitol and that most of the material that it had preserved was unorganized.
According to Fox News:
“The Republican legislator in charge of the GOP looking into the work of the panel claims that the House-selected panel that looked into the Capitol riot from January 6, 2021, didn’t adequately maintain documents, data, and even video depositions, which included conversations it had together with the Biden White House which are currently missing.”
“Representative Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., chair of the Subcommittee regarding Oversight on behalf of the Committee on House Administration, said Fox News Digital reports that the now-disbanded “J6″ group, which was headed by the Democrats and had just two Republican Party members, has additionally failed to offer any proof that it investigated the Capitol Hill security mistakes on the actual day of the riot.”
“There were no indexes. There had been no index or table of content. Normally, a database system is used where everything is digitized as well as indexed while conducting an inquiry of this kind. Nothing like that exists here. We just received raw data,” he claimed. “We took our time looking through it, and as we did, I began to realize that the Blue Team, whose job it was to look for security violations, had left us with very little.”
Loudermilk stated that the committee wanted to blame former President Trump, who was subsequently charged, for supposedly instigating the riot, so the “Blue Team” had been “shut down” just before it could look into the matter of security failings at the Capitol.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) appointed the House Select Committee to look into the Attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, and Representative Benny Thompson (D-MS) served as its chairman. The committee was supposed to be made up of five Republicans along with eight Democrats, but Pelosi took the extraordinary step of refusing two Republican nominations, prompting McCarthy to withdraw all of the Republican candidates. Instead, she hand-selected two Republican opponents of Trump.
The group spent millions of dollars and had a sizable team of attorneys, including former attorneys. The committee spoke with over 1,000 witnesses who gave testimony in closed-door depositions, frequently while being sworn in. In scripted hearings where committee members read off teleprompters, very few among the witnesses were asked to give public testimony. Videos and transcripts were produced, however, only a small number of the clips and transcripts have been made available to the public.
A number of witnesses said that the members of the panel had openly accused these individuals of misconduct, which they had rejected in their testimony, and that their account of events had been deliberately altered to change or even reversed its meaning. Republicans also believed that the committee was in contact with the Dept. of Justice and also the White House of President Biden, maybe to get around witnesses’ procedural rights and collect evidence for upcoming charges.
McCarthy wrote to Thompson in November 2022 as a result of these worries, not long after Republicans regained control of the House in the midterm elections. “The preservation of all acquired data is essential,” he added, “not only for institutional prerogatives but also for openness to the American people. The American people have the right to be aware that the claims you’ve made are backed up by the evidence.”
Similar demands were made of Thompson by the House Administration Committee’s Republicans.
According to Fox News Digital, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), vice chair of this committee, and Thompson responded to the White House to inform them that they would legally maintain all of the committee’s records and turn them over to the National Archives. Additionally, Thompson assured CNN that the committee will keep all of its records.
However, Thompson acknowledged in his letter to Loudermilk the fact that the panel had not saved what he termed “temporary” records, such as videos along with transcripts that hadn’t been used “in public hearings in addition to official releases” of the committee or to “even further their investigative activities.”
