WASHINGTON DC, Feb 9 — Congressman Barry Loudermilk [R-GA] is chairman of the House panel that is overseeing what happened on “January 6th.” As he put it in an interview with Rebecca Weber, CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens and host of AMAC’s Better For America podcast, “We want the truth of what really happened in an unbiased manner, not taking sides, not looking for a particular outcome.”
His mission, he said, was to discover “How did the Capitol fall? How were these people able to get in? Regardless of who they were, they should have never been able to breach our security in the Capitol.” Loudermilk went on to note that the answers to those questions required information that was in the hands of a Democratic-controlled committee. Indeed, he said, “we received just under 2 million printed pages, hard copies that were thrown into boxes. They weren’t catalogued or categorized. We received five hard drives of digital data, but we started realizing that we didn’t have everything. We knew that the Select Committee, the Democrat-controlled Committee, videotaped every deposition, every interview that they did. We had none of those videotapes, which is something that is supposed to be retained.”
And then Loudermilk said he and his House panel started finding documents that were “sent to the White House for archiving, and some were sent to the Department of Homeland Security for archiving, which was unprecedented.” In addition, video testimony was not provided. And so, he asked Select Committee Chairman Benny Thompson why. “And his response was that you have all the printed testimonies. You don’t need the videotapes, and therefore we didn’t keep them. Which is interesting because it’s the reason you videotape depositions.”
In fact, Loudermilk told Rebecca Weber in her interview, “a significant amount of data was missing. So, to try to figure out what we were missing, we hired an external forensics team to take the five hard drives and do a low-level analysis of them. Scraping is what they call it, to see if there is something that was corrupted or something that was hidden, or something that was deleted that we should have. After doing the scrape, they found an enormous number of deleted documents. It was not too surprising because if these are working hard drives, you delete duplicates as you go and so that wasn’t too surprising. But as we started to compare, we started finding that there were documents that we did not have that were recovered from the recycle bin or deleted folders. Now, something that raised our eyebrow was the date that the documents were deleted. In particular, some were deleted on January 1st, 2023. Now, the reason that’s important is the Republicans took control of the House on January 3rd, two days later. So, this was literally, hours before the Select committee ceased to exist. And so, it was interesting that these documents were deleted at that time, but more interesting, one of the documents we recovered was related to White House documents. So we knew that there were documents that were purposely not given to us and that were also deleted by someone in the Select Committee.
As Congressman Loudermilk told The New York Post recently, “we don’t know yet what’s in the deleted and encrypted deleted files. If the former January 6 Select Committee has nothing to hide, then why would they prevent Americans from seeing all the evidence produced in their investigation? They were hiding something, and we will continue to uncover the truth.”
John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.