House Republicans are creating a committee to “re-examine” the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
More than two months after the dissolution of the historic House Election Committee on Jan. 6 published its final report Regarding efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, House Republicans are launching their own review of the Uprising in the Capitol.
With their panel on January 6, they want to set a different focus. And the Georgia Republican, who will chair the new panel, uses the phrases “investigate both sides” and “show what really happened on January 6” to describe the committee’s work.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican and chair of the Property Management Subcommittee on Oversight, said his panel will work “aggressively” to review the security shortcomings that contributed to the Jan. 6 capitol burglary and investigate behavior and the performance of the previous Jan. 6 House Select Committee, which amassed millions of pages of documents and hundreds of interviews in 2021 and 2022, including with key members of Trump’s inner circle.
“We have dedicated employees working on this,” Loudermilk said.
Loudermilk told CBS News his panel will consider seeking an interview with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi as part of its work, including any decisions about Capitol security before Jan. 6.
“If there’s a need, we want her to come over and talk to us about it,” Loudermilk said. He also raised the prospect of interviewing former members of the Jan. 6 House select committee.
The House Selection Committee attracted national attention and media coverage in the past year by a Series of nationally televised hearings This included footage of the attacks on the police. The committee held hearings throughout 2022, some in prime time, at which senior Republican figures testified about former President Trump’s efforts to pressure them to overturn the election results and his role in inspiring and fueling political threats of violence and the riots in the Capitol.
The committee included two Republicans, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, but was otherwise largely boycotted by House Republicans last Congress.
Loudermilk said his new subcommittee is reviewing two million pages of documents compiled by the Jan. 6 House select panel.
“I spent quite a bit of time going through documents,” he said. “Unfortunately, when the documents were preserved, they were not categorized very well. So many documents were packed in boxes.”
Loudermilk said his panel is also reviewing some of the 40,000 hours of police video, the same tranche of footage spokesman Kevin McCarthy recently created Provided exclusively for Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Loudermilk said his panel is also likely to seek interviews with former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund and former House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving about security decisions made before the Jan. 6 attack. Other congressional bodies and government auditors have already conducted investigations and issued reports on security and intelligence failures, including a series of reviews by the Government Accountability Office and a report by the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
“I want to show what really happened on January 6,” Loudermilk said. “When asked by CBS News what he meant by the phrase, ‘What really happened,’ he replied, ‘Where was the security failure and why were we not ready?’
Rep. Norma Torres, a California Democrat who will serve as the panel’s top Democrat, told CBS News, “I think it’s obscene to go back and try to repeat the work of a bipartisan committee that’s very focused found out what happened.”
Torres said, “It serves no purpose other than if you’re an insurgent or you support an insurgent and you want to portray a different story than what really happened that day.”
Torres was among the group of members of the House of Representatives who were trapped on the upper balcony of the House of Representatives chamber on January 6. She recalled that the rioting mob was “only 10 seconds behind them” as they fled.
Torres has criticized the release of Jan. 6 police footage sent to Fox’s Carlson and said she was concerned the new subcommittee and Republican members would deny the mob’s true violence and intent.
“It’s unfortunate that this has become political theater for them,” Torres said. “It’s a show for them. They want a different ending to the movie, to the horror show.”
While praising the work of the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 last year, Loudermilk heaped criticism on the panel. He told CBS News, “Americans have very little faith in the report that they’ve put out. And for a good reason. I mean, you even consider what they did to me, the false accusations they made against me in relation to the voters that I had in my office in the office buildings – and accused me of doing reconnaissance tours.”
The Jan. 6 selection panel last year requested an interview with Loudermilk to discuss a tour group his office arranged on Jan. 5, 2021 on the Capitol grounds. Loudermilk said the group was not near the Capitol during the January 6 violation and criticized the select committee for publicly announcing its request for an interview with him before informing him about it.
The tour group was on the grounds of the Capitol Office Building during a time when the complex was closed to public tours and visitors due to the COVID pandemic.
Last week, former House Select January 6 committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, said his committee had not indicated that Loudermilk was supporting insurgents by giving the group a tour. When asked about the possibility of testifying before Loudermilk’s panel, Thompson told CBS News, “We have completed our work and are moving forward.”
Loudermilk said his panel will be “honest, show the truth, show both sides”. Pressured by CBS News that January 6 had “two sides,” Loudermilk repeated his criticism of the scrutiny given to him by the January 6 selection committee for the tour group.
He acknowledged that those arrested for their role in the Capitol siege included those who had “violent intentions,” but said the arrests included others who “had only come to protest.” “. Loudermilk said his review of some of the unreleased Jan. 6 police videos showed a wide range of actions by people amid the mob.
He pointed to a video in which he said “shows one of the people grabbing an officer by the neck, pulling him down and[starting]beating him.” But Loudermilk claimed that other footage shows, “Capitol police only run around with those who came to the Capitol. They have this great contrast of scenes of violence against Capitol Police and scenes of Capitol Police just walking around.”
Carlson has been criticized by some Republicans in Congress over recent claims that police welcomed and escorted some of the mob on Jan. 6 or acted casually in the crowd. Guidebook.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, said, “In my view, Fox News made a mistake in reporting this in a way that is completely at odds with what our Chief Law Enforcement Officer is saying here in the Capitol thinks.”
No public hearings of the new subcommittee have been announced. But unlike the original Jan. 6 selection committee, the minority party will not boycott the new subcommittee’s hearings and procedures.
Torres said she will be active at hearings and meetings, but said Democrats have not yet received full information on the new subcommittee’s plans or timeline.
“They didn’t give us anything,” she said. “They didn’t even give us the dates of the meetings, which is very basic information. And I think the general courtesy to the minority would be to at least extend the courtesy of giving us the dates when we expect it, you know, being informed about it and being there for a briefing as to who the witnesses might be and what the The purpose of this information is what they collect.”
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Source : news.yahoo.com