Get the best experience and stay connected to your community with our Spectrum News app. Learn More
Continue in Browser
Get hyperlocal forecasts, radar and weather alerts.
Please enter a valid zipcode.
Save
WASHINGTON — House Democrats are countering a Republican-led report on the congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
In December, the House Oversight Committee said the chamber’s Jan. 6 special committee was politicized and recommended former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the panel’s vice chair, be investigated for potential criminal witness tampering in the testimony of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson.
The Jan. 6 committee convened in July 2021 to investigate the attack on the Capitol earlier that year during the presidential vote certification. Seven Democrats and two Republicans served in the group that ultimately referred former President Donald Trump for criminal charges related to an insurrection inspired by his refusal to accept the result of the 2020 election.
In its rebuttal to the Republican report that said the Jan. 6 committee was a tool to attack Trump and included “outrageous claims” that lacked evidence, Democrats said the Republican-led Oversight Committee report was “a work of fiction” and an attempt “to erase inconvenient truths, undermine accountability and weaken Capitol security” while neglecting “critical issues to attempt to exonerate Trump.”
The 73-page report, issued by Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, begins by quoting Republican House leadership from Jan. 6, 2021, when then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., the chairman of the House Administration Committee’s subcommittee on oversight, both reached out to Trump urging him to tell his supporters to stand down.
“In the months that followed, however, Congressional Republicans reversed course,” the Democrats’ report said. “They sabotaged plans for a nonpartisan 9/11-style commission to investigate the attack and obstructed efforts to hold those responsible for the violence accountable.”
They said House Republicans repurposed the Oversight Committee after securing a narrow majority in January 2023, turning it “into an apparatus to advance the political interests of former President Trump and his allies by burying the truth about January 6, 2021.”
