NEW: House Republicans Launch Investigation Of January 6 Committee
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced Wednesday that House Republicans will be launching their own investigation of the controversial January 6 select committee, members of which have been accused of a wide-range of misconduct. Former President Biden pardoned all members of the committee, including former U.S. Rep.s Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, in a highly questionable move on the last day of his presidency.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) will chair a new select subcommittee, which will be housed within the House Judiciary Committee. Loudermilk has overseen a separate investigation into the January 6 Capitol protests and the now defunct January 6 committee under the House Administration Committee and had repeatedly called on Speaker Johnson to launch a formal investigation in the new congressional session.
Since the new investigation is classified as a “select” committee, Speaker Johnson will have the sole official power to decide which House members will sit on the new panel. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) did not allow Republicans to appoint their own members to the previous January 6 Committee, a move that broke decades of House precedent.
Pelosi refused to allow then House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to appoint Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Jim Banks (R-IN) to the panel, arguing that both had agreed with Trump’s objection to the 2020 election results and were thus ineligible to serve. As a result of the deviation from decades of precedent, McCarthy pulled all Republican nominees from the panel.
Pelosi then appointed now former U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, two “Republicans” who have since left the party and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024.
Cheney presides over primetime, heavily-edited January 6 Committee hearings in 2022
“House Republicans are proud of our work so far in exposing the false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 Select Committee during the 117th Congress, but there is still more work to be done,” Johnson said in a statement. “We are establishing this Select Subcommittee to continue our efforts to uncover the full truth that is owed to the American people.”
In addition to the deviation from House precedent, the partisan January 6 Committee has been accused of a wide range of misconduct.
In 2023, Rep. Loudermilk revealed that the committee had destroyed documents, text messages and other records. This was done despite orders from incoming House Speaker McCarthy to preserve all records relating to the investigation.
“As far as holding people accountable, yes, they should be,” Loudermilk said of committee members in an interview with Just The News last year. “But I think that’s going to be a little ways down the road, because there is so much more information that we need to get. And we need to build not only this, to get the truth out to the American people, but see just how big this case potentially is for obstructing.”
The January 6 committee — which hired a Hollywood producer to spice up its primetime hearings — telegraphed numerous bits of misinformation to the American people. In one instance, the committee aired testimony from former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who claimed that Trump attempted to grab the steering wheel of a secret service vehicle and drive back to the Capitol when the protests devolved into a riot. This claim has been thoroughly debunked by Secret Service agents.
The committee also cherry-picked video footage and failed to mention that police caused the riot by firing crowd control munitions. This footage, along with 14,000 additional hours, were hidden from the American people in favor of cherry-picked clips.
Loudermilk has also confirmed that the committee — which interviewed hundreds of witnesses as part of the investigation — deleted all of its deposition tapes. “I can confirm that. And all of the videotapes of all depositions are gone. Again, we found out about this early in the investigation when I received a call from someone who was looking for some information off one of the videotapes and we started searching and we had none,” Loudermilk said.
The Georgia lawmaker explained that he asked Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who chaired the January 6 committee, if he could view the tapes. Thompson wrote back stating that the tapes were not preserved, adding that the committee felt they didn’t have to.
“He didn’t feel that they had to, but according to House rules, you have to preserve any data and information and documents that are used in an official proceeding, which they did. They actually aired portions of these tapes on their televised hearings, which means they had to keep those, but yet he chose not to,” the congressman added.
Loudermilk does believe that the tapes exist somewhere and stressed that recovering them is a top priority. “Even with Cassidy Hutchinson, people have asked why do you need the videos? You’ve got written transcripts. Well, when you’ve got someone like Cassidy, who is significantly changing her testimony, I want to see what her body language is when she gave her original testimony. I want to see what her voice inflection is,” he said.