Georgia GOP Rep. Barry Loudermilk left with assurances that his probe into the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol will be formally established as a new committee after he posed with House Speaker Mike Johnson for a photo to commemorate the beginning of the next Congress.
The action makes the Republican Party’s attempt to change the story of January 6 a recurring theme in its investigational agenda. Now that the GOP will control both chambers of Capitol Hill and the White House, it is part of a larger effort by Republicans to carry out a number of GOP-led investigations from the previous Congress.
Loudermilk told CNN that while the specifics of the new committee are still being worked out, one possibility is to design it so that Johnson has more authority over the selection of panel members and the course of the committee’s work.
The Republican attempts to shield President-elect Donald Trump from responsibility for the January 6 violence remain prominent, as evidenced by the creation of a new committee to highlight Loudermilk’s work, which included a report suggesting the FBI prosecute GOP former Rep. Liz Cheney.
Loudermilk described the previous January 6 select committee, which Cheney assisted in leading, as “so singularly focused that basically Trump created this entire problem.” “When, in fact, there were numerous failures at various levels.”
Even so, Loudermilk acknowledged that mentioning January 6 in the title of the new panel might give the wrong impression.
It’s somewhat of a trigger for people, in one way. In another, it is even more restrictive because there are other security concerns besides January 6, Loudermilk told CNN.
Johnson has declared in public that the new investigation into January 6 will be “fully funded.”
Republicans intend to use their new majority in a number of ways, including continuing their politically charged investigations into the earlier January 6 select committee, which included Cheney as vice chair and another Republican member, and the broader security response to the Capitol attack.
According to two people familiar with the situation, Republicans reissued subpoenas on Monday regarding two Justice Department tax investigators who worked on the Hunter Biden case and special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, CNN reported. These subpoenas would revive previous Congress’s efforts that have been contested in court for months without a resolution.
Trump’s Justice Department, which is anticipated to be considerably more accommodating to congressional Republicans seeking documents and information, will receive the restated subpoenas.
Hur’s audio recordings of conversations between President Biden and his ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer regarding classified material for a memoir following his tenure as vice president are the subject of one subpoena. The right-wing Heritage Foundation and media organizations like CNN are pursuing this in court, requesting the release of these and other recordings that Hur was able to obtain. Judges have heard the DOJ’s repeated arguments that these kinds of audio recordings shouldn’t be released to the public.
The subpoenas to the DOJ tax investigators, Jack Morgan and Mark Daly, are extensions of previous subpoenas issued by the House Judiciary Committee. The House sued the DOJ for preventing the men from appearing for depositions regarding the Hunter Biden investigation, and the testimony was not given. The DC District Court’s Judge Ana Reyes is currently hearing this case, which is on hold.
Morgan’s lawyer did not reply to a request for comment on Tuesday, and Daly’s lawyer declined to comment.
Even before their new majority took office, House Republicans hinted that they might look into special counsel David Weiss’s handling of Hunter Biden’s tax and gun prosecutions and special counsel Jack Smith’s two criminal cases against Trump. Their attempts to target the prosecutors were mostly unsuccessful while the criminal investigations were still going on.
