January 6th committee didn't turn over its records to the House

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

This is blatantly illegal.

One might almost call it an attack on the Constitution and our legal system.

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Ironic, isn’t it? The self-righteous and arrogant January 6th Committee collected documents, depositions, and videotapes over a 2-year period while conducting what amounted to a Star Chamber kangaroo court.

For those of you unfamiliar with the real-world Star Chamber, it was an English court established ostensibly to hold members of the aristocracy responsible for crimes on the assumption that the common law courts might fear convicting men of high standing. It was advertised as ensuring that equal justice applied to all.

Instead, it was the embodiment of abusing power. Just like the January 6th Committee proved to be.

Fox News reports that the House Committee that was supposed to inherit the files from the January 6th Committee was handed a jumbled mess of unorganized files and computer records, and as they have been sorting through them they discovered that about 1/2 the records are missing.

This is illegal for a number of reasons, both due to laws demanding the preservation of records, and by the rules by which the committee was established. Many January 6th defendants have been requesting some of these records for their defense, claiming that they contain exculpatory evidence, and the House simply cannot provide them due to their absence.

That is obstruction of justice and violates the rights of defendants.

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 disorganization, by the way, is an underhanded legal tactic used by sleazy lawyers to rob their opponents of time to sift through evidence. The first I heard of it was Hillary Clinton turning over documents (after having conveniently “lost” them) to a committee filled with extraneous paperwork not relevant to the case. All the relevant material was hidden away in reams and reams of irrelevant documents, making it supremely difficult to sort through the material.

Last I checked, Congressional investigations into supposedly vital matters aren’t less organized than the research for a 7th grader’s term paper. Nor is such research buried in among an encyclopedia’s worth of paper.

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.

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The Democrats who ran the January 6th Committee are incensed that the Republicans in the House are questioning their integrity and insist that everything is on the up and up, and even claim that in some cases the rules allowed them to dispose of evidence they deemed irrelevant to their goals.

We all know what their goals were, of course. And any evidence not used in their final report is precisely what people would be looking for. Tossing it out is tantamount to an admission that there was stuff in there they didn’t want the world to see.

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.

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.”

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Rep. Bennie Thompson is basically telling us that employees under the control of the House Speaker–a very partisan Democrat dedicated to pushing a narrative–told the committee they could toss whatever evidence they didn’t use to make their very partisan case–including depositions from witnesses.

Depositions that do not corroborate what the Democrats wanted people to believe.

Unbelievable.

No, actually quite believable. These people break the law every day while proudly proclaiming they do so in order to “preserve democracy.”

We are so far beyond going through the looking glass that I no longer expect anybody to make a peep about things like this. The MSM will take any leak from a partisan Democrat and blow it up into a world-class scandal, no matter how ridiculous.

But Democrats can make a bonfire to destroy crucial documents in order to obstruct justice and hide information from the American people and the MSM will cheer them on.

Unfortunately, most people look for signals from the media to help them determine what they should pay attention to. Unless the media focuses on something scandalous, most people will assume that any controversy is merely politicians squabbling. We don’t all have time to sort the wheat from the chaff, so we outsource the task.

The MSM uses this presumption to push the Democrat agenda–creating scandals out of nothing for Republicans, and printing “Republicans pounce” pieces on every dirty deed done dirt cheap by the Democrats.

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By now there is no level of Democrat mendacity they will not cover up–unless the establishment decides to throw that Democrat overboard.

Biden may soon face that peril because of his age and inability to stay awake. If top Democrats don’t want him to run again–suddenly the criticism will heat up.

But until then Slow Joe will just be a loving father, a doting grandfather, and a policy wizard.

How do these guys look at themselves in the mirror?

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Jazz Shaw 8:30 AM | October 06, 2024
John Sexton 6:20 PM | October 05, 2024
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