By The Federalist (Politics) | Created at 2024-12-19 16:51:03 | Updated at 2024-12-19 22:55:01
6 hours ago
House Speaker Mike Johnson’s scrapped omnibus spending bill would have made it nearly impossible for congressional investigators to expose what the corrupt Jan. 6 Select Committee was trying to cover up at a time when new facts are coming to light about the extent of the Select Committee’s censorship and destruction of records.
A section in the bloated omnibus spending bill, which would have funded the government through March 2025, allowed lawmakers to block subpoenas that demand information from the House — a provision obviously aimed at shielding members of the now-defunct Select Committee from further scrutiny and possible criminal charges.
Given recent revelations about the Select Committee on January 6, it’s no wonder House Democrats tried to sneak a section into the sprawling spending bill that would have protected them. An interim report released earlier this week by House Republicans shows that the overarching goal of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Select Committee was to hide the truth about Jan. 6 and concoct a narrative blaming President Donald Trump for the riots at the U.S. Capitol that day.
The top lines from the nearly 130-page report by the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, as my colleague Tristan Justice detailed, are shocking enough on their own.
The Jan. 6 Committee destroyed more than a terabyte of digital data, including video records of hundreds of witness interviews that House Republicans examining the committee were unable to access, along with more than 100 encrypted, password protected documents, for which Democrats never provided the passwords.
The report also confirmed that Former Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, colluded with “star witness” Cassidy Hutchinson using the encrypted Signal app to circumvent Hutchinson’s attorney, Stefan Passantino, whom Cheney later targeted in an attempt to get him disbarred. (The collusion was serious enough that House Republicans recommended Cheney face a criminal investigation for “witness tampering.”)
In addition, the report reveals that top officials at the Defense Department simply dismissed President Trump’s orders to ensure the safety of the planned demonstration at the U.S. Capitol, then lied to congressional leaders about the D.C. National Guard response.
What all these details reveal, together with an earlier investigation by the House GOP on the security failures of Jan. 6, is that Pelosi’s committee was not trying to bring light to the events of that day, but to obscure them and spin a narrative totally unsupported by key facts — facts that Cheney and the Democrats worked hard to keep from coming out during their staged hearings and sham investigations.
Georgia Republican Barry Loudermilk, chairman of the House subcommittee that released the report, correctly noted that the real causes of Jan. 6 were a “series of intelligence, security, and leadership failures at several levels and numerous entities,” and that there was an “excessive amount of political influence on critical decisions, and a greater concern over the optics than for protecting life and property.”
These things were difficult to uncover, said Loudermilk, because the Select Committee did its utmost to hide the truth and push a false narrative. For example, the committee tried to depict Trump as complicit in the Jan. 6 riots by dithering while violence erupted at the U.S. Capitol. But in fact, the president urged Democrats to accept a detachment of 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the U.S. Capitol ahead of the planned demonstrations there, but Democrat leaders refused.
Not only did Democrats refuse, but Trump’s own Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller dismissed an order from Trump on Jan. 3, three days before the riots, to use “any and all military assets necessary to ensure safety for the planned demonstrations on January 6, 2021,” according to the report. When the day itself came, even as protesters were approaching the Capitol, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy “intentionally delayed the D.C. National Guard response” and then lied about it, “stating that D.C. National Guard was physically moving to the Capitol, with full knowledge these forces had yet to receive any orders,” the report said.
All of this was bad enough, but it corroborates what Loudermilk disclosed last month in a letter to the inspector general for the Department of Defense: that the Pentagon withheld key details about National Guard deployment delays in its own IG report about Jan. 6. In his letter, Loudermilk claimed the inspector general’s office “knowingly concealed the extent of the delay in constructing a narrative that is favorable to DoD and Pentagon leadership,” and he demanded a correction of the Defense Department IG report published in November 2021.
These revelations come on the heels of a Justice Department inspector general report released earlier this month that found there were dozens of FBI informants among the demonstrators on Jan. 6, and that a few entered the Capitol. One of those who entered the Capitol even had his travel expenses to and from Washington, D.C., paid for by the FBI.
In addition, that DOJ report found that the FBI didn’t canvass the area around the Capitol for potential security threats as they normally would have, but gave no reason for why they didn’t. Then-FBI Associate Deputy Director Paul Abbate described the lack of canvassing as a “basic step that was missed” and told the Justice Department’s OIG he would have expected a formal canvassing to have been conducted beforehand through what the FBI calls the issuance of an “intelligence collection product.” We still don’t have an explanation for why this wasn’t done, and to date no one at the FBI has been held accountable.
In fact, no one in the entire federal government has been held accountable for any of the wrongdoing, coverups, insubordination, and dereliction of duty that transpired before and after Jan. 6. In part, because we don’t know the extent of it thanks to the coverup by the Democrats’ Select Committee. What we need now more than ever is full transparency, a complete investigation, and all the records and documents the Select Committee has refused to hand over to House Republicans.
It can’t be stressed enough that none of what we know now about Jan. 6 came out during the sham hearings and phony investigations conducted by Pelosi’s Select Committee. Any evidence that countered the narrative that it was all Trump’s fault was quashed, denied, or destroyed. Republicans have since unearthed some of it, but there’s much more to be discovered. The American people deserve to know what really happened that day.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
