Report: J6 Committee Deleted More Than 100 Files Just Before the GOP Took Over

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

We saw how the Jan. 6 Committee wasn't particularly interested in the truth. Rather, their whole purpose seemed to be about how they could spin things to smear former President Donald Trump and the Republicans prior to the 2022 midterms. They didn't care about things that might deviate from or blow up their spin. 

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But now it looks like they may be in trouble themselves, according to a new bombshell report from Fox.

The House Administration Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee, led by Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), has been looking into the security failure that day as well as what the Jan. 6 Committee did. The J6 Committee, chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), was supposed to turn over their files to the new GOP-led panel. 

I wrote last year about the failure of the Committee to turn over all the information to the Republicans and how it was turned over in a completely unorganized manner. Plus, the Committee also had questionable contact with the White House, including about an “agreement” between the Jan. 6 Committee and the executive branch “to interview personnel whose names were later redacted.”


READ MORE: 

J6 Committee Failed to Turn Over Records Required to Preserve, Including Communications With White House


But it turns out there was a little more to the story that has developed since then that Fox is revealing.

Sources told Fox that Thompson said he would be turning over four terabytes of data, then turned over only about two. But Loudermilk's Committee hired a forensics team to scrape the hard drives and found out that 117 files were deleted and encrypted. They were deleted on Jan. 1, 2023 –  just days before the GOP was to take over and Thompson had to turn over the data. 

But even though they tried to delete the information, it looks like they weren't smart enough to do it right. According to the report, the forensics team recovered all 117 deleted and encrypted files, and now Loudermilk is demanding to know what was going on here and how to get into the files. 

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Loudermilk sent a letter to Thompson that Fox obtained. 

In the letter, he says Thompson acknowledges that he didn't archive all the Committee records as he was "required by House rules" to do.

"You wrote that you sent specific transcribed interviews and depositions to the White House and Department of Homeland Security but did not archive them with the Clerk of the House," the letter says. Why are they sending the interviews/depositions to the White House but not recording them for the archives as they are supposed to? Sounds like they're trying to give the Biden White House a heads up, but not Congress and the American people. 

Loudermilk explained that after a forensic analysis of the data and archived hard drives, he was able to recover "numerous digital records from hard drives archived by the Select Committee."

"One recovered file disclosed the identity of an individual whose testimony was not archived by the Select Committee," Loudermilk wrote. "Further, we found that most of the recovered files are password-protected, preventing us from determining what they contain."

Loudermilk asked that Thompson provide him "a list of passwords for all password-protected files created by the Select Committee" so that his committee can "access these files and ensure they are properly archived."

Loudermilk has also written to the White House and the DHS demanding they turn over the unreacted transcripts they had been provided by the Jan. 6 Committee. by Jan. 24. 

"It’s obvious that Pelosi’s Select Committee went to great lengths to prevent Americans from seeing certain documents produced in their investigation. It also appears that Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney intended to obstruct our Subcommittee by failing to preserve critical information and videos as required by House rules," Loudermilk told Fox News Digital. 

"The American people deserve to know the full truth, and Speaker Johnson has empowered me to use all tools necessary to recover these documents to get the truth, and I will."

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So that's an intriguing question: What was the Jan. 6 Committee trying to hide when they deleted these files? Why was an allegedly "independent" committee seemingly having such contact with the Biden White House? And they need to turn over the access so we can figure that out. It has to be things that wouldn't advance their narrative or things that can hurt that narrative. And as we go into the election, that's likely to be more important. 

Perhaps Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney want to clarify why these files were allegedly deleted? 

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