Following the release of more than 40,000 hours of video footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, many House Republicans and conservative activists called for a probe of the Democratic-led committee that investigated the riot.
Now that effort seems to have stymied as key evidence has disappeared, according to the congressman leading that inquiry.
Georgia GOP Rep. Barry Loudermilk told the conservative website Just the News on Thursday that all of the videos of depositions of J6 Committee witnesses, such as former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson, are “gone.”
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That is apparently in violation of House rules.
“All the videotapes of all the depositions are gone,” said Loudermilk.
Loudermilk said that was discovered early in the initial investigation of the special Jan. 6 committee, which was appointed by former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi assured the committee would be left-leaning and anti-Trump when she rejected early GOP picks, such as Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, and selected instead left-wing Trump-hating Republican reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
Loudermilk, chairman of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, was tasked with probing J6 committee’s actions and security failures that may have contributed to the riot.
The demand from conservatives for looking into the committee, and particularly Cheney and Kinzinger, picked up momentum after House Speaker Mike Johnson released more than 40,000 hours of footage of the riot last month.
Critics accused the committee of cherry-picking the footage to promote its anti-Trump agenda, as the film seemed to undercut much of the left-wing narrative about the riot.
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“I wrote a letter to [Democratic Rep. and J6 chairman] Bennie Thompson asking for them and he confirmed that they did not preserve those tapes. He didn’t feel that they had to,” Loudermilk told Just the News.
“But according to House rules, you have to preserve any data and any information and documents that are used in an official proceeding.”
The congressman noted that the committee actually used some video from those interviews in its effort to pin the riot on former President Donald Trump.
“I believe they exist somewhere. We’ve just got to find where all these videos are,” said Loudermilk.
Loudermilk said it’s critical to have the tapes because some witnesses have been changing their testimony.
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