J6 Committee failed to preserve records, has no data on Capitol Hill security failures, GOP charges
by Andrew Mark Miller, FoxNews, August 9, 2023
FIRST ON FOX: The House select committee that investigated the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021 failed to adequately preserve documents, data and video depositions – including communications it had with the Biden White House that are still missing – according to the Republican lawmaker overseeing the GOP investigation into the committee's work.
The now-disbanded "J6" committee, which was run by Democrats and included only two GOP members, has also failed to provide any evidence that it looked into Capitol Hill security failures on the day of the riot, Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight for the Committee on House Administration, told Fox News Digital.
Loudermilk said his staff has had difficulty gathering all the information it needs to investigate Rep. Bennie Thompson’s handling of the J6 investigation.
"Part of our task as this oversight subcommittee is to actually address the security failures, look into how did it happen… how were these folks able to get into the Capitol," Loudermilk said. He said the documents they obtained came over in boxes and was completely unorganized.
"Nothing was indexed. There was no table of contents index. Usually when you conduct this level of investigation, you use a database system and everything is digitized, indexed. We got nothing like that. We just got raw data," he said. "So it took us a long time going through it and one thing I started realizing is we don't have anything much at all from the Blue Team."
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The "Blue Team," as described by Loudermilk, represents the group within the J6 committee that was directed to investigate security failures at the Capitol. Loudermilk explained that sources have told him the Blue Team was essentially "shut down" by the committee in order to focus on placing the blame on former President Trump.
"We've got lots of depositions, we've got lots of subpoenas, we've got video and other documents provided through subpoenas by individuals. But we're not seeing anything from the Blue Team as far as reports on the investigation they did looking into the actual breach itself," he said.
"What we also realized we didn't have was the videos of all the depositions," Loudermilk added.
Loudermilk said he has been contacted by a defense attorney that needed access to key information in one of the video depositions, and the committee realized it did not have the videos he was seeking.
Fox News Digital obtained correspondence letters between Loudermilk and Thompson’s offices in which the two disagreed on whether the J6 committee preserved what it was required to under House rules.
Loudermilk says Thompson’s committee was required by law and House rules to preserve and turn over all data related to their investigation at the end of the congressional term in December, and Loudermilk said as much to Thompson in a letter on June 26.
In response, Thompson wrote a letter saying that Loudermilk’s letter had many "factual errors" and claimed his committee had followed the rules and turned over "4 terabytes" of data.
Loudermilk told Fox News Digital that his committee has only received 2.5 terabytes of data and said the first footnote in Thompson’s letter to him on July 7 acknowledged they did not keep what they were supposed to.
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In that footnote, Thompson wrote, "Consistent with guidance from the Office of the Clerk and other authorities, the Select Committee did not archive temporary committee records that were not elevated by the Committee’s actions, such as use in hearings or official publications, or those that did not further its investigative activities. Accordingly, and contrary to your letter’s implication, the Select Committee was not obligated to archive all video recordings of transcribed interviews or depositions. Based on guidance from House authorities, the Select Committee determined that the written transcripts provided by nonpartisan, professional official reporters, which the witnesses and Select Committee staff had the opportunity to review for errata, were the official, permanent records of transcribed interviews and depositions for the purposes of rule VII."
"He's saying they decided they didn't have to," Loudermilk told Fox News Digital. "It was clear in law they had to especially and, I mean, if there was any question, the fact that they used the videos in the hearings would dictate that it had to be preserved. The more we go in the more we're realizing that there's things that we don't have. We don't have anything about security failures at the Capitol, we don't have the videos of the depositions."
Republicans have long maintained that many security warnings were ignored leading up to the Capitol Hill riot which was supported by Steven A. Sund, former chief of the Capitol Police, who wrote in his book that several government agencies had intelligence of a brewing threat but failed to communicate that with Capitol Police.
