Mar
30
Can We Trust the January 6th Committee and Its Official Report?
“Until we know all the basic facts about that day, Americans will have no reason to be confident that justice has been served.” — John Daniel Davidson, Senior Editor at The Federalist
The events that occurred on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, and the question of who is to blame is a divisive and mostly bipartisan issue in the U.S. The 117th Congress formed the United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, whose composition was essentially a “stacked deck” against Donald Trump. After many hearings and arrests, the committee issued its final report at the end of Dec. 2022. Not surprisingly, it blamed Trump for a whole lotta bad and questionable stuff and recommended criminal charges against him.
But, it is fair to question how reliable a report from such a biased committee is likely to be.
In January 2025, Hillsdale College hosted an event at which John Daniel Davidson — a former senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and currently Senior Editor at The Federalist — gave a talk which has since been adapted into an article for Imprimis. It isn’t a comprehensive timeline or anything like that, but I do recommend reading it. Here, though, I wanted to cite portions where he talks about the Select Committee in particular. I think you will find it simultaneously enlightening and disturbing…
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The official report of the House Select Committee, which runs to more than 800 pages, is too deeply biased to give much help. This was foreordained given the hyper-partisan way the Select Committee was formed. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s two Republican appointments to the committee — Representatives Jim Jordan and Jim Banks — and instead appointed two virulently anti-Trump Republicans, Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
The Select Committee’s report, issued in December 2022, omitted important information about January 6 and failed to address many lingering questions about the government’s role and response. Its partisan (and specifically anti-Trump) purpose can be deduced from its recommendations: that the Department of Justice pursue criminal charges against Trump and that Congress bar Trump from ever again holding federal office.
In some instances, the Select Committee showed a blatant disregard for facts. It claimed, for example, that Trump was aware of violence at the Capitol for more than three hours — 187 minutes, to be exact — before he took action to intervene. Cheney referred to this as a “supreme dereliction of duty.” But in fact, according to a timeline of events compiled by The New York Times (and corroborated by The Washington Post), no more than 25 minutes passed between the reported breach of the Capitol at 2:13 p.m. and Trump’s first tweet addressing the situation at 2:38 p.m., when he wrote, “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!” About 30 minutes later, Trump again took to Twitter to address the demonstrators: “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order — respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”
More important than the report’s factual errors are the serious questions never investigated by the Select Committee. Why did Democrat congressional leaders turn down repeated offers of National Guard troops to protect the Capitol that day? Why was security so lax outside the Capitol despite expectations of a large demonstration? How many FBI informants and other undercover federal law enforcement officials were in the crowd? What communication did the FBI or FBI informants have with protest organizers ahead of the event? Why wasn’t then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund told there were federal informants in the crowd? Why did the U.S. Capitol Police open the doors and allow demonstrators into the building? Why did federal law enforcement authorities demand cell phone location data for the thousands of people who were outside the Capitol but broke no laws? Why does the FBI still have no idea who planted the pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee on the evening of January 5?
Defenders of the official narrative accuse those who ask such questions of being conspiracists. But until those questions are answered, our understanding of January 6 — no matter our political leanings — will be incomplete….
Much of what we have learned about [what actually happened at the rally on the Ellipse and at the Capitol itself] is from more than 40,000 hours of security footage that had been kept under seal by House Democrat leadership and excluded from the Select Committee’s inquiry. This security video was released to Tucker Carlson by Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy after Republicans took over the majority in the House in the 2022 midterms. Among other things, it shows clearly that after the chaos had subsided, U.S. Capitol Police were ushering people into the building. One must presume that many of those who entered the Capitol during this period were unaware of the earlier clashes with police and assumed — because police were waving demonstrators along and, in some cases, even escorting them — that they were allowed to be there.
The video released by McCarthy included footage of Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman” who became the face of the “insurrection” in the media and who was sentenced, in the fall of 2021, to 41 months in federal prison. As many as nine police officers calmly escorted Chansley around the Capitol complex, at several points even checking for unlocked doors for him. They did not try to hinder, let alone apprehend him. It also included footage showing Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died on January 7, 2021, walking around and apparently healthy on January 6. A month after his death, the Washington, D.C. medical examiner issued a report concluding that Sicknick died of natural causes. To this day, Democrats and the corporate press cite Sicknick’s death as evidence of their narrative, claiming he died due to blunt force trauma to the head with a fire extinguisher. The security footage withheld by the Select Committee clearly indicates that this never happened….
Perhaps most puzzling of all was the Capitol Police Board’s failure to request National Guard assistance prior to January 6, which, according to a separate bipartisan Senate report, meant that “the District of Columbia National Guard was not activated, staged, and prepared to quickly respond to an attack on the Capitol.” This failure stands out in part because Trump himself, in the days leading up to January 6, was adamant that 10,000 National Guard troops be deployed ahead of that day — a fact Cheney concealed by hiding an interview transcript produced by the Select Committee. Trump’s request for troops was not only ignored by Pelosi and Bowser, it was also met with resistance at the Pentagon, which delayed the deployment of the National Guard and then covered it up….
The disclosure about the 26 informants invites further questions about what other elements of federal law enforcement were present that day and what exactly they were doing. The video released by McCarthy shows that Ray Epps, a man who is suspected of being an FBI informant and who was at the heart of the events of January 6, lied to Congress about his movements. When the Select Committee had him testify in an attempt to clear his name after footage emerged of him urging the crowd to storm the Capitol, Epps told committee members that he never entered the Capitol. He testified that when he texted his nephew at 2:12 p.m. that day, writing that he had “orchestrated the protests at the Capitol,” he was already back at his hotel room. But surveillance footage shows this is not true. Epps remained at the Capitol for half an hour after he sent that text. Members of the committee knew this but never followed up.
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It seems that, when the dishonest behavior of the Select Committee (and other Democrats) is revealed and the rest of the evidence is uncovered, it is they who look like criminals and not Trump. What a waste of time and money! Then again, lying and wasting other people’s money is what these folks do best.
