Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia is demanding that the White House turn over a number of transcripts of interviews with the House Select Committee on January 6.
Loudermilk heads the House Administration Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and is leading an audit of the disbanded January 6 committee’s investigation into the Capitol riot. Loudermilk revealed earlier this month that the January 6 committee did not keep all of its records, and that some are being held by the White House and Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“[T]he White House is in possession of records that are the property of the U.S. House of Representatives, including testimony provided to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol,” Loudermilk wrote in a Friday letter to the White House obtained by NBC News. “These records must be returned immediately in their original form without alteration or redaction.”
The Georgia Republican said that the White House appears to be holding the transcripts of interviews of “multiple Secret Service agents or employees who were assigned to former President Trump on January 6, 2021.” Loudermilk said that the interviews of the Secret Service employees were referenced in November 2022 letters between the White House and DHS.
“[N]o Congressional committee, prior to the Democrat-controlled Select Committee, had ever sought to compel the testimony of a Secret Service agent about activities they observed while performing protective functions,” he wrote. “Despite this, you wrote that President Biden would not assert executive privilege with respect to testimony to be provided by these individuals to the Select Committee.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tapped Loudermilk to lead an investigation into the January 6 committee’s findings. Earlier this month, Loudermilk accused the committee of manipulating evidence to create an anti-Trump “narrative” while failing to investigate key aspects of the Capitol riot, such as the actions of security officials at the U.S. Capitol that day.
“Basically, all they did after spending $18.5 million was come out with a manifesto against [former President Donald Trump], trying to tie Donald Trump to the attack on the Capitol,” Loudermilk said in an interview with The Daily Wire. “That was their narrative. Everything that they did appears to be to just come up with that narrative.”
CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILY WIRE APP
The January 6 committee “blue team” was tasked with investigating Capitol security, but Loudermilk said that after reviewing the committee’s underlying research, his team found next to no documentation showing the blue team ever investigated.
“That’s a set of documents that we don’t have. Now our question is: did these documents ever exist?” he said. “It’s more than likely,” Loudermilk said, that the blue team did investigate, but found something that “somebody didn’t want them to,” so “they suppressed the records.”