Despite Orders to Preserve Evidence, Jan 6th Committee Destroyed Nearly Everything When GOP Took House

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), left, chair of the House Select Committee and Rep Liz Cheney (R-WY) committee co-chair.Photo byDrew Angerer/Getty Images

Incoming Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, (R-CA) ordered the House Select Committee investigating January 6th to "preserve its records, evidence and transcripts," as required by federal law. The now-disbanded committee, chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D-MS), ignored that order and has destroyed nearly everything in its possession.

Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight for the Committee on House Administration, told Fox News that the committee hadn't looked into the decisions that resulted in security lapses at the Capitol, further noting much of the evidence the committee did preserve was disorganized.

Fox News reported:

The House select committee that investigated the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, failed to adequately preserve documents, data, and video depositions – including communications it had with the Biden White House that are still missing – according to the Republican lawmaker overseeing the GOP investigation into the committee’s work.

“Nothing was indexed. There was no table of contents index. Usually, when you conduct this level of investigation, you use a database system, and everything is digitized, and indexed. We got nothing like that. We just got raw data,” he said. “So it took us a long time going through it, and one thing I started realizing is we don’t have anything much at all from the Blue Team [which was to have investigated security lapses].”

According to Loudermilk, the “Blue Team” was “shut down” before security lapses at the Capitol could be probed.

While the Jan. 6th committee was to have been composed of eight Democrats and five Republicans, Pelosi took the unprecedented step of rejecting two Republican nominees and instead handpicked two Republicans who had publicly declared anti-Trump sentiments.

The committee spent millions of dollars and had an extensive staff of lawyers, including former prosecutors, conducting over 1,000 interviews of witnesses, who testified in closed-door depositions.

However, only a few of these witnesses were called to testify publicly at hearings. These testimonies were highly scripted, with committee members reading from teleprompters.

While videos and transcripts were made, just a few clips were released to the public. During the hearings, several witnesses complained their depositions had been selectively edited to distort their meaning, and that committee members had publicly accused them of wrongdoing without evidence.

Due to those concerns, McCarthy wrote to Thompson in November 2022, saying:

“It is imperative that all information collected be preserved not just for institutional prerogatives but for transparency to the American people,” he wrote.

“The American people have a right to know that the allegations you have made are supported by the facts.”

Republicans on the House Administration Committee also made a similar request to Thompson.

Thompson and committee vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney wrote to the White House and said they would preserve all of the committee’s materials, as the law requires.

However, Thompson admitted to Loudermilk in a letter, that the committee had not preserved what he described as “temporary” materials, which included videos and transcripts not used “in [public] hearings or official publications.”

By designating information not publicly released as "temporary materials," the committee destroyed nearly everything in its possession, as only a small fraction of the total had ever been aired publicly.

Taking issue with the unprecedented deletion of potentially exculpatory evidence, former President Donald Trump on Tuesday blasted the Jan 6 committee on Truth Social:

“So now that I have full Subpoena Power because of the Freedom of Speech Sham Indictment by Crooked Joe Biden, Deranged Jack Smith, and the DOJ, it has just been reported that the Unselect January 6th Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs has illegally destroyed their Records and Documents.

This is unthinkable, and the Fake Political Indictment against me must be immediately withdrawn. The system is Rigged & Corrupt, very much like the Presidential Election of 2020. We are a Nation in Decline!”

The destruction of investigatory work product by the Jan 6 committee is prohibited by federal law as these materials are required to be placed in the national archives, but are also material evidence in an ongoing prosecution of a former President of the United States, and subject to subpoena by Trump's attorneys.