A House panel seeking to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion has learned that the hand-picked panel appointed by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi when Democrats controlled the House deleted and encrypted files, according to a new report.
Fox News reported Monday that the House Administration Committee’s oversight subcommittee, which is led by Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, discovered that 117 files were deleted on Jan. 1, 2023, just before the deadline for Pelosi’s panel to share all of its information with the new GOP-controlled panel.
Those files, which were also encrypted, have since been recovered because a digital forensics team was hired to scrape the hard drives, the report said.
“It’s obvious that Pelosi’s Select Committee went to great lengths to prevent Americans from seeing certain documents produced in their investigation,” Loudermilk told Fox News. “It also appears that Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney intended to obstruct our Subcommittee by failing to preserve critical information and videos as required by House rules.”
Democratic Rep. Thompson of Mississippi and then-Republican Rep. Cheney of Wyoming were the chairman and vice chairwoman of the Jan. 6 committee.
“The American people deserve to know the full truth, and Speaker [Mike] Johnson has empowered me to use all tools necessary to recover these documents to get the truth, and I will,” Loudermilk said.
The congressman has written to Thompson demanding access to the files.
“As you acknowledged in your July 7, 2023 letter, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (Select Committee) did not archive all Committee records as required by House Rules,” Loudermilk wrote in the letter, which was obtained by Fox News.
“You wrote that you sent specific transcribed interviews and depositions to the White House and Department of Homeland Security but did not archive them with the Clerk of the House,” he said.
The congressman said Thompson “claimed that you turned over 4-terabytes of digital files, but the hard drives archived by the Select Committee with the Clerk of the House contain less than 3- terabytes of data.”
Loudermilk said there are questions surrounding the recovered files.
“One recovered file disclosed the identity of an individual whose testimony was not archived by the Select Committee,” he wrote. “Further, we found that most of the recovered files are password-protected, preventing us from determining what they contain.”
The congressman requested “a list of passwords for all password-protected files created by the Select Committee” so that his committee could “access these files and ensure they are properly archived.”
The American people have the right to see and determine what actually happened on January 6th — with the facts, not a predetermined narrative.
As our investigation continues, we’ll keep working to uncover only the truth. @BrookeSingman https://t.co/DrDcu2pn1S
— Rep. Barry Loudermilk (@RepLoudermilk) January 15, 2024
Loudermilk said his investigation is entering what he termed a new phase and has full support from Johnson.
He has sought full unredacted and unedited transcripts of White House and Department of Homeland Security staff interviewed by the Pelosi-picked panel.
Last month, Loudermilk noted that other files had also gone missing.
“All of the videotapes of all depositions are gone,” he said, according to Just the News.
Loudermilk said the significance of that is that it is now impossible to determine whether the transcripts that remain are accurate, noting that Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified against former President Donald Trump, offered revisions to her testimony months after her original appearance, according to Just the News.
