Jan. 6 Select Committee’s Political Probe Diverted Resources From Real Security Failures

The latest report in Chairman Barry Loudermilk’s probe of the work of the Jan. 6 Select Committee highlights how the heavily partisan panel failed to achieve one of its main objectives: to review and improve Capitol security. Instead, it diverted its resources to manufacturing a narrative against former President Donald Trump. 

Loudermilk’s House Administration Oversight Subcommittee concluded in its latest interim report that the Select Committee manufactured a “false, pre-determined narrative” of former President Donald Trump’s personal guilt for the Capitol breach, ignoring the deeper security issues and leaving the Capitol just as vulnerable to a similar breach today. 

“The Select Committee wholeheartedly failed to address the security failures on January 6, 2021, and failed to archive significant portions of the evidence it collected and used to formulate its conclusions,” the committee wrote in its interim report released on Tuesday. “As a result, the Capitol is no safer today than it was at the creation of the Select Committee.” 

An ever-growing litany of security failures preceding and during January 6 have emerged since that day, including a failure of Capitol leadership to respond to advanced warnings of a potential for violence, refusals to follow orders from the White House from the Pentagon when the Capitol breach began, and an unidentified individual caught on camera planting pipe bombs that may have endangered the life of the vice president-elect. 

However, the Jan. 6 Committee, led by Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., diverted their resources and attention to interviews and hearings dedicated to pinning the blame on President Trump and overlooking clear evidence that a cascading series of security failures left the Capitol vulnerable to a breach. 

Influencing the Narrative

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, became a star witness in the Select Committee’s public hearings where she purported to illuminate the public on the inner workings of the Trump White House on the day that mob entered the Capitol building and was a focus of the Select Committee’s effort to further their narrative that Trump was to blame. 

However, the public show concealed the reality that Hutchinson made significant material changes to her original, closed-door testimony to the committee members. Her changes were memorialized in an errata sheet subsequently obtained and reviewed by Just the News.  

Absent from her original account, but touted by the Select Committee in her subsequent public appearances, were new narratives, such as the infamous claim that then-President Trump had tried to grab the wheel of the presidential vehicle in anger to drive to the Capitol. This incident was disputed by other witnesses, including Secret Service personnel who were present. 

In the previous interim report from the Oversight Subcommittee, Loudermilk and his staff concluded that the Democrat-led panel withheld crucial evidence from the public, including witness interviews that conflicted with the testimony. 

The changes were made after Hutchinson fired her lawyer, Stefan Passantino, and replaced him with a legal team recommended to her by Liz Cheney herself, an arrangement that raises significant legal questions of witness tampering, Loudermilk’s report says. 

Communications from the Signal messages app show that Cheney communicated personally with Hutchinson about her testimony before the Select Committee and indirectly through an intermediary about securing new legal representation. 

“Hi, this is Cassidy Hutchinson. I’m sorry for reaching out this way, but I was hoping to have a private conversation with you (soon) if you are willing,” Hutchinson wrote to Cheney on June 6, 2022, as she was preparing for another round of testimony. “I would be happy to. Let me know what time works for you,” Cheney replied. 

In the new report, Loudermilk and his committee asked the FBI to investigate Cheney, suggesting that her communications with Hutchinson may constitute witness tampering. 

“This secret communication with a witness is improper and likely violates 18 U.S.C. 1512. Such action is outside the due functioning of the legislative process and therefore not protected by the Speech and Debate clause,” the subcommittee concluded. 

You can read the latest report below:

“The concern I have with Liz Cheney is that she basically became the de facto chairman of the committee. She was in charge, she was calling the shots, and she was communicating behind the scenes with Cassidy Hutchinson during that period of which she started changing her testimony,” Chairman Loudermilk told the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. “So the question is, did Liz Cheney convince her to start changing her story?”

Cheney pushed back on Loudermilk’s report in a statement to Fox News Digital, saying the report “intentionally disregards the truth and the Select Committee’s tremendous weight of evidence.”

Loudermilk’s subcommittee, however, is not able to fully assess the evidence gathered by the Select Committee. In fact, after Republicans gained control of Congress in the 2022 midterms, the Select Committee deleted troves of documents, video recordings, and interview transcripts. In all, over a terabyte of data from the panel’s investigation is missing, according to Loudermilk. 

Private Admissions

However, evidence gathered since the Jan. 6 Select Committee released its final report shows significant security failures that occurred on that day and in some cases contradicts the committee’s neatly curated narrative. 

For example, in explosive video footage, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi exclaimed to her chief of staff that she—and Democratic leadership—bore some responsibility for the Capitol breach. 

The footage was recorded by Pelosi’s daughter Alexandra, who helped HBO shoot a documentary about the Jan 6 riot. But the video was not aired in its entirety until this summer after Loudermilk obtained and released it. 

“We have responsibility, Terri,” Pelosi is heard saying on the videotape to her chief of staff, Terri McCullough. “We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have. This is ridiculous.”

Pelosi also said: “You’re going to ask me – in the middle of the thing when they’ve already breached the inaugural stuff – ‘should we call the Capitol Police, I mean the National Guard?’ Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?” 

Security Failures

Loudermilk’s report highlights failures by the Pentagon to adequately prepare for Jan. 6 contingencies and implement orders from then-President Trump to ensure that his rally and the capital city were safe. The subcommittee says senior military officials “were responsible for the significant and intentional delay” in approving the National Guard deployment to the Capitol, despite the prior orders from Trump. 

Especially, Loudermilk said his probe found that Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller “dismissed” an order from Trump three days before the riot to use all necessary resources to ensure the safety of the protestors and the capital city, that Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy “intentionally delayed” the D.C. National Guard deployment in response to the riot, and that McCarthy also briefed Congressional leaders that National Guard assistance was on the way before any orders were officially delivered. 

The report also skewered the Jan. 6 Select Committee for failing to probe this obvious security failure: “Regrettably, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (“Select Committee”) only included the National Guard’s role in the response as Appendix One to their 845-page Final Report.” 

“However, the Subcommittee maintains that the D.C. National Guard’s delay in quelling the violence at the Capitol is central to understanding the major security failures that occurred on January 6, 2021, as well as adequately responding to an attack of this magnitude in the future,” Loudermilk’s committee wrote. 

In addition to Pentagon delays, Loudermilk’s report describes several security failures by the Secret Service, which was apparently inadequately prepared to manage the chaotic situation on Jan. 6. These lapses were chronicled in a Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report. 

In one incident from that day, the Secret Service transported Vice President-elect Kamala Harris within yards of a pipe bomb that was planted by an unidentified individual outside the Democratic headquarters in Washington, D.C. near the Capitol, Just the News previously reported. 

Steven joined Just the News in August 2023 after previously working as a Research Analyst for the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) in Tallahassee, Florida. He is a two-time graduate of Florida State University with a Masters in Political Science and a B.S. in International Affairs. 

Reprinted with permission from Just The News – By Steven Richards

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.