A Republican congressman auditing the Democrat-driven investigation into January 6 says the now-disbanded House select committee manipulated its findings to craft a political narrative.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight for the Committee on House Administration, received a request from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to audit the January 6 committee’s findings. After gathering the piles of evidence – documents, depositions, videos, and other information – uncovered by the January 6 Committee, Loudermilk says there are conspicuous gaps in the records.
“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.”
The Georgia Republican requested all of the January 6 committee records from its former chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS). What Loudermilk received showed how the January 6 committee omitted key facts about the riot in its final report, he said.
The most shocking discovery that Loudermilk made, he said, was evidence that showed “there were some plain-clothes law enforcement officers” among the rioters “who were encouraging people to go into the Capitol.”
He said the January 6 committee also manipulated evidence and made false claims, in one instance targeting him. The report says Loudermilk gave a tour of the U.S. Capitol to a man later accused of joining the riot. The man “took a tour of the Capitol with Representative Barry Loudermilk, during which he took pictures of hallways and staircases,” the report says.
The Georgia congressman says that is false. Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger told the committee that, while Loudermilk did lead a tour of several people around some of the Capitol Hill offices and hallways, they never entered the Capitol building.
In addition, Loudermilk says he found little about the security around the Capitol building that day. The committee investigated it; it assigned its “blue team” to cover that part of the investigation into the riot. But Loudermilk says that little evidence from the blue team’s research was included in the files he received.
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“That’s a set of documents that we don’t have. Now our question is: did these documents ever exist?” he said. Loudermilk posited that “it’s more than likely” that the blue team did investigate, but found something that “somebody didn’t want them to,” so “they suppressed the records.”
Notably not included in the boxes of evidence, Loudermilk found a letter Thompson sent to the White House and the Department of Homeland Security appearing to show a manifest of records the committee received from both as part of its investigation. Thompson’s letter catalogued what it was returning as the committee was shutting down. Loudermilk said those records never should have been returned, and is now attempting to retrieve them.
“We need to get to the truth of what really happened and look into the conduct of the January 6 committee,” Loudermilk said. After all of his discoveries, one of his primary concerns now is working out “how much more of this report is just made up narrative.”