The House Select Committee on January 6 has turned out to be nothing more than a conclusion-selective partisan effort to pin the Capitol riot squarely on Donald Trump, rather than a legitimate investigation into what took place. That’s the conclusion of an interim report from the House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight released Monday.

The subcommittee, headed by Chairman Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), is tasked with truly investigating the events of  January 6, as well as examining the politicization of Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 Select Committee.

A Con Job From the Beginning

According to the report, the J6 Committee violated House procedure and norms from the outset, including:

• Nancy Pelosi’s unprecedented refusal to allow GOP members who would challenge its anti-Trump narrative or dig deeper into the actual events of January 6.
• Pelosi appointing Trump’s avowed enemy Liz Cheney to be vice chairperson, contrary to House rules.
• Chairman Bennie Johnson also violating House rules by not establishing rules governing the committee, thus allowing it almost unlimited power.
• Hiring Hollywood producers to stage J6 prime-time hearings with one goal: “Get Trump.”

Buried Exculpatory Evidence

The J6 committee was convened to examine the federal government’s failures, including such things as intelligence sharing and security measures, that led to the breach of the Capitol. However, the report concludes, Pelosi’s committee didn’t do that. The authors conclude,

The mandate for the Select Committee does not mention “President Trump,” yet the Select Committee’s Final Report mentions him more than 1,900 times, revealing the actual focus of the Select Committee’s investigation. The Select Committee did not try to hide their partisan intent to legislatively prosecute President Trump — it memorialized it.

This speaks to the interim report’s most damning findings: Pelosi-Cheney wanted to gut Trump so badly that they presented evidence they knew to be false and hid the evidence that proved it.

Take the case of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, ,who was a “star witness” in one of the J6 Committee prime-time productions. In her fourth interview, Hutchinson dramatically changed her story from her previous three, saying, among other things, that she had heard President Trump was so determined to go to the Capitol himself on January 6 that he fought Secret Service agents and lunged for the steering wheel of the limo in which he was being transported.

However, the Loudermilk committee discovered that:

Reps. Thompson and Cheney were aware that the Secret Service agent driving the SUV on January 6 directly refuted Hutchinson’s testimony. Despite this, they still included her testimony in the Final Report and insisted it was credible.

They buried the Secret Service agent’s direct witness testimony that blew apart Hutchinson’s dramatic, widely reported tale. They also buried the testimony of Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato, which confirmed Trump suggested deploying 10,000 National Guard troops to guard the Capitol before January 6 (but was rebuffed by Pelosi), and that both Trump and his administration continued to look for ways to try to prepare for trouble at the Capitol.

Hiding and Deleting Evidence on Their Way Out the Door

 Loudermilk found that the Pelosi-Cheney committee buried and even destroyed evidence until the GOP took power in the House after the mid-term elections.

Reps. Thompson and Cheney failed to turn over video recordings of witness interviews and depositions despite using these recordings in their high-profile, primetime hearings. The Subcommittee recovered over one hundred deleted or password-protected files, including some files that were deleted days before Republicans took the majority. They also hid multiple transcribed interviews of witnesses who had firsthand knowledge of Trump’s actions on January 6.

According to Loudermilk, Pelosi’s committee originally handed over only about half the information it had collected, despite the fact that House rules require handing over every last bit. More than one terabyte of data was missing.

Teaming with Fani Willis

Further evidence that the J6 Committee wasn’t as interested in facts as in its own narrative: Members coordinated with Fulton County (Georgia) District Attorney Fani Willis, helping fuel her investigation of Trump. Willis contacted the Committee, which according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, handed over “key evidence about what former President Trump and his advisors knew” about the 2020 presidential vote tabulations in Georgia. Politico reported that Willis and staff had multiple calls and meetings with the Select Committee, which are not found in federal records. Loudermilk said his investigators will continue looking into the coordination between Willis and the J6 Committee.

Conservative Treehouse suggests a good place to start: a woman named Mary McCord. She was tapped by J6 Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson to lead the fight to obtain former President Donald Trump’s White House records. A former top DOJ official, McCord has been involved in everything from the Russia-collusion hoax through the Jack Smith investigation.

A True Investigation into J6 Is Just Beginning

So much about the events of January 6 remains unknown. Why did Nancy Pelosi ignore warnings that the day would bring trouble and reject the offer of National Guard? Does her statement that she was “worried about optics” stand up to scrutiny? Why would she be worried about optics if the threat to the Capitol was really coming from MAGA supporters? 

Did Pelosi and the incoming Biden administration want be trouble on January 6 in order to launch a full-out assault on Trump and his supporters? After all, that was the result. 

Was Liz Cheney directly involved in the set-up? We’ve recently learned that she was responsible for an op-ed from ten former defense secretaries, including her father, warning Trump against getting the military involved domestically. Interestingly, that op-ed ran in The Washington Post on January 3, 2021 — three days before the Capitol riot.

Was a full debate in the U.S. House and Senate over the merits of the electoral challenge so dangerous to our democracy that some people felt it necessary to resort to violence to ensure it was canceled? That is the one vital matter that was blocked that day — not the certification of the election results. The real issue was discussing the constitutionally allowed challenges to the swing state election results, and a full airing in the House and Senate, with America looking on, of the evidence of fraud, misdeeds, and folly that were rife within them.

And finally, what role did the FBI, intelligence community, and other agents provocateur have in actually instigating and igniting the violence of January 6?

Said Loudermilk:

The American people deserve the entire truth about what caused the violent breach at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. It is unfortunate the Select Committee succumbed to their political inclinations and chased false narratives instead of providing the important work of a genuine investigation. In my committee’s investigation, it is my objective to uncover the facts about January 6, without political bias or spin. My report today is just the beginning.

 

Al Perrotta is managing editor of The Stream, coauthor with John Zmirak of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and coauthor of the counterterrorism memoir Hostile Intent: Protecting Yourself Against Terrorism.