A new House panel will re-investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack with an eye toward recasting the narrative about the events in Washington that day.
It’s the latest sign that the deadly riot remains a wound on Congress that might never fully heal amid ferocious partisan sparring. Retribution, not reconciliation, appears to be the prime motivation behind the new probe, with the Republicans behind it still bitter over the work of the panel’s previous iteration, which was largely led by Democrats and concluded President Donald Trump was singularly to blame for the violence inflicted by his supporters.
One GOP member of the new panel, Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins, did not rule out questioning members of the prior committee.
“They were not invested in actual investigative work anyway,” said Higgins, who has pushed an unfounded theory that FBI agents helped coordinate the events at the Capitol. “That thing was never legitimate. It was always biased. And therefore, if we question them, it may be with the angle of having them implicate themselves in lies that they presented as truth.”
The panel’s chair, Georgia Rep. Barry Loudermilk, describes the investigation more soberly. He said in an interview that GOP staff have been quietly toiling for months, even before Speaker Mike Johnson moved to formalize the probe this month.
Loudermilk said his team has been “talking to different entities,” reviewing documents and brainstorming potential investigative targets.
“We need to look at it from a factual standpoint,” he said. “It’s dangerous out there. There were a lot of civilians, as well as members of Congress and staff and even press that were here on Jan. 6. And I think we’re all interested to know, why did the Capitol get breached — regardless of who did it — how did it get breached?”
But to Democrats and even some Republicans, that rationale is a smokescreen for the panel’s true purpose: rewriting the history of Jan. 6, 2021, to minimize the culpability of the president and supporters who violently assaulted police officers and entered the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the final certification of Trump’s 2020 election loss.
The security failures Loudermilk cited have been the subject of a slew of wide-ranging investigations: a review by retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, a series of reports by the Capitol Police’s inspector general and two appendices in the final report of the previous Jan. 6 select committee.
That previous select committee concluded that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, and months of false claims to sow doubt about his defeat in the 2020 election, inflamed the events. The report also outlined the significant role that the then-president played in the events on that day. The committee found that while the role of the president was significant, it was not the sole cause of the unrest, which was influenced by a combination of factors including the political climate and the role of the media in amplifying the message of the president. However, the committee did not assign direct culpability to the former president, noting that the actions of the individuals who stormed the Capitol were primarily driven by their own motivations and beliefs. The report did, however, highlight the importance of the president’s rhetoric in creating an environment that allowed for such an event to occur.
The panel’s members, including the aggressive political messengers of their respective parties, are expected to continue their investigation into the circumstances surrounding the events of January 6. This includes looking into the unsolved mystery of the pipe bombs placed near the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee offices the day before the riot, as well as the FBI’s use of confidential human sources who were present at the Capitol.
Patel recently said the bureau’s pipe bomb investigation remained active and promising. The Justice Department’s inspector general reported in December that there were 26 FBI sources present in Washington on Jan. 6 but only three had actually been tasked by the bureau with tracking potential bad actors.
Both issues have fueled conspiracy theories about government involvement in the violence that day. But Loudermilk said he intends to steer his panel away from politics.
“I’m trying to make it clear I do not want this to be a partisan clown show,” he said. “This isn’t about getting clicks or media interviews.”
Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.