Morning Wire - Untold Truths: Correcting the January 6 Committee’s Narrative | Sunday Extra

Episode Date: August 13, 2023

The House Select Committee that investigated January 6 – which was made up almost entirely of Democrats – failed to save several important documents before it wrapped its operations. Republican Congressman Barry Loudermilk has been tasked with investigating and auditing the committee’s findings. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The House Select Committee that investigated January 6th, which was made up almost entirely of Democrats, failed to save several important documents before it wrapped its operations. Republican Congressman Barry Loudermilk has been tasked with investigating the committee's findings. In this episode, we speak to Congressman Loudermilk about what his audit has found and how he believes the committee excluded important evidence that did not support their narrative. I'm Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Sunday, August 13th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire. The January 6th Committee, which was made up of Democrats and two anti-Trump Republicans, put on a series of public hearings all focused on condemning Donald Trump. Joining us now is the Republican who's in charge of auditing that committee's findings.

Congressman, thank you so much for joining us. So first, what is your goal in auditing the Select Committee's investigation into J6? Why is your investigation necessary? Well, twofold. One is the January 6th committee failed to do what part of their task was, which was determining where was the security failure at the Capitol. I don't care who was coming to the Capitol. There was no way anyone should be able to breach the security of the Capitol, especially when

the Capitol was officially closed due to COVID, and it wasn't even open to the public. And that was one of the key aspects of what the Select Committee was supposed to be doing. Not only did they not report on any of that, there's no document. So how can you fix a problem if you didn't even identify where it is? So that's our primary task. Actually, find out what happened on January 6th, what the security failure was, and start reforming our capital security to fix the problem. The other aspect of it is the conduct of the January 6th committee itself.

Basically, all they did after spending $18.5 million was come out with a manifesto against Trump trying to tie Donald Trump to the attack on the capital. And that was their narrative and everything that they did appears to be to just come up with that narrative. So we need to get to the truth of what really happened and look into the conduct of the January 6th Committee. Why did they not look at the security failures of January 6th? And we know that part of what they reported is false. They falsely accused me of giving reconnaissance to us, which we have found out now through our investigation and look at the evidence. not only did they know a month in advance that that accusation was false, the Capitol Police had said it was false.

We know that internally within the committee itself, the recommendation was to not go forward with this because there was no evidence, but they decided to make that accusation anyhow. And in their final report, they reported as if we actually gave tours of the Capitol, which was false. So it leads us to question how much more of this report is just made up narrative. Right. Now on the J6 committee, it was the blue team that was supposed to research capital security. So what did happen to their research? That's the question because that's a set of documents that we don't have. Now, our question is, did these documents ever exist? And the reason we're asking that question, if you're going to investigate U.S. Capitol Police and you're going to investigate a security failure, you also have to investigate the political oversight of the Capitol Police. Now, from the House side,

there's two entities that have that oversight, the Speaker's Office and the House Administration Committee. Now, the chair of the House Administration Committee, Zohloffron, was actually on the January 6th Committee, which is a huge conflict of interest. So it now causes us to question, was the blue team actually shut down and not allowed to investigate at all? Yeah. And you've corresponded with Democrat Benny Thompson, the J6 Committee Chair, about these missing records. What did he tell you about them? He actually admitted that they just decided not to keep some records. And he's trying to justify it that they weren't important to the report. But one thing is, there's certain records we don't know whether we have them or not,

but we do know that there's certain records that we don't have, like the Blue Team. It could be that they never generated any records. I think there is something there that's more than likely that the team found something that somebody didn't want them to find out so they suppressed the records. but there were videotapes of depositions and interviews. Those videotapes were actually used in some of the televised hearings. So we know those exist. Right. And also we came across some letters that were not turned over to us,

but we found them from other sources where Benny Thompson was writing a letter to the White House and Department of Homeland Security, where he was explaining that they were returning records to them when they clearly were supposed to keep those. And so we know those are missing. I wrote Vinnie Thompson and I brought these instances up and we asked for his assistance in finding those records. Basically, his response was that they determined what records they were going to keep

and what records they didn't and they just didn't keep some records. Wow. Do you believe you're going to get the records from the White House and DHS and what will you be looking for in them if you do? Well, first of all, I've already written letters to the Department of Homeland Security and the White House. asking for any documents that they provided the select committee on January 6th. We don't know exactly what to ask for because the letter that we found has been heavily redacted,

especially the letter to the White House. And it redacted the itemization of the records that they were returning. So a little over a week ago, we sent the letter to the White House and Department of Homeland Security and asked them to promptly, you know, respond to us with the documents, every document that they provided. So we're waiting to hear back from the White House at this point. Final question. What is the most shocking detail or revelation you've uncovered so far going through this evidence? Well, to me, it's after $18.5 million that was spent trying to figure out,

number one task was how do we secure the capital? They did nothing with that. But from the evidence that we've been reviewing, I take this investigation from the approach of, hey, we take a theory or we take something that somebody is claiming that happened, And we try to prove it false. If you try to prove it true, you'll do it every time. But if you try to prove it false and you can't, then you've found the truth. And so probably the most shocking is that we have verified that there were some plain closed

law enforcement officers who were not Capitol Police who were encouraging people to go into the Capitol. We do have videos of other similar type activities that were in process of trying to verify whether or not they were law enforcement officers. And so that brings up a lot of concern on our part is why do we have any law enforcement officer encouraging people to go in the capital, especially if they're not capital police officers. And what's important about that is metropolitan police law enforcement from the executive branch are not allowed to be on capital grounds unless they are specifically asked to be there or there's a preexisting agreement that is enacted. And we do know that there were law enforcement agencies that were non-capital police that were on capital grounds before any of the agreements were enacted, nor were they invited. So basically they were already on capital grounds in violation of our law.

So we need to find out why were they there at that point and what were they doing? Well, let's hope you get some answers. Congressman, thank you so much for joining us. All right. Thanks a lot. That was Congressman Barry Loudermilk, and this has been an extra edition of Morning. Fire.