The chair of a House subcommittee warned that some members of a controversial Jan. 6 investigatory subcommittee could face charges of hiding and destroying documents.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) said in an interview last week that he may refer former members of the committee to the Department of Justice for prosecution after a report that he commissioned found that its members allegedly hid information from the public.
“As far as holding people accountable, yes, they should be,” Mr. Loudermilk told Just the News last week after the report was released, referring to the possibility that committee members will face punishment.
“But I think that’s going to be a little ways down the road, because there is so much more information that we need to get.
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“And we need to build not only this, to get the truth out to the American people, but see just how big this case potentially is for obstructing.”
However, the Georgia lawmaker suggested that there are “other options,” including censuring and ethics referrals. “But also consider there are members of that Select Committee who are no longer members of Congress. So they may fall under a different scenario,” Mr. Loudermilk told the media outlet. “So we do have the tools of members of Congress, but also, active members of Congress have certain protections. So we’ll have to work on that. Because as you talked about earlier, we’re in uncharted territory right now. And so we’re going to have to work through this.”
He also said that he believes that Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the now-disbanded Jan. 6 select committee, allowed then-Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) to make decisions for the panel.
“There’s still documents that we need to get hold of. We still don’t have passwords for the encrypted documents,” Mr. Loudermilk said. “It’s amazing that you know, when I asked the former Chairman Bennie Thompson, ‘All I want you to do is give me the passwords.’ He said, ‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’
Well, I think it’s coming down to he probably didn’t, because now new information we’re getting is that Liz Cheney ran that committee.”
On March 12, a previously undisclosed transcript of the House Jan. 6 Select Committee’s interview with an unnamed Secret Service officer who drove the presidential SUV on Jan. 6 provided new information about outgoing President Donald Trump’s actions that day. That transcript of the driver contradicted key witness Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony—namely her claim that President Trump tried to grab the wheel of his presidential car.
President Trump “never grabbed the steering wheel,” the Secret Service agent said, according to a transcript reviewed by The Epoch Times last week. “I didn’t see him lunge to try to get into the front seat at all.”
The testimony was given to the Democrat-dominated select committee convened to investigate the events of Jan. 6, 2021, in the previous Congress, but the transcript wasn’t released by the committee.
House Republicans said in the new report that Ms. Hutchinson’s version of the story was false, according to the driver’s testimony.
“Despite the driver of the president’s SUV testifying under oath that the Hutchinson story was false, the select committee chose to validate and promote Hutchinson’s version of the story as fact,“ they stated in the report. ”The select committee hid the driver’s full testimony and only favorably mentioned his testimony in its final report, it did not release the full transcript.”
Mr. Thompson said in a statement that his panel explained in 2022 that it had to send some transcripts to the executive branch for review “to protect sensitive information as well as the privacy of witnesses.”
He said the panel’s final report “took into account the testimony of all witnesses” and that “all the evidence points to the same conclusion: Donald Trump wanted to join his violent mob as it marched on the Capitol.”
In response to the report last week, Ms. Cheney, who lost her Wyoming Republican primary by more than 40 percentage points, suggested on social media platform X that Mr. Loudermilk and others are lying and trying to “cover up what [President Trump] did” on Jan. 6. She also recently wrote that people should instead read her committee’s report.
