Four years after the day of the fateful attack on the U.S. Capitol — and two years after congressional Democrats’ investigation laid blame largely at Donald Trump’s feet — that narrative has been severely altered thanks to a two-year GOP probe that has rewritten the script.
Led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, the investigation concluded that Democrats’ single-minded focus on condemning Mr. Trump blinded them to many of the realities of that day.
The GOP probe has punctured the story, told by the Democrats’ star witness, Cassidy Hutchison, that Mr. Trump forcibly grabbed the steering wheel and tried to make his Secret Service agents take him to join the mob at the Capitol.
Republicans also released tapes of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi taking responsibility for leaving the Capitol largely undefended — blame Democrats had heaped on Mr. Trump. The Pentagon, too, has been tarnished by the GOP rewrite, which said top Defense Department officials failed to deliver on Mr. Trump’s valid requests for military support.
And Republican investigators, in their extensive review, said they found no evidence that Mr. Trump backed rioters chanting for Vice President Mike Pence to be hanged, or that Mr. Trump secretly planned to join the mob at the Capitol.
The results, Mr. Loudermilk told The Washington Times, left Democrats’ narrative in tatters.
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“We have totally debunked it,” he said. “It is totally based on fiction, not fact. It’s a predetermined narrative. Nancy Pelosi and [former Rep.] Liz Cheney and the group decided what they wanted to be the truth, so they carefully edited and cherry-picked evidence to come up with a story.”
What is undeniable about Jan. 6 is a mob of thousands of Trump supporters descended on the Capitol grounds and perhaps 2,000 of them breached the building, roaming its halls and offices and doing a fair bit of destruction.
Members of Congress, who were supposed to be counting the Electoral College votes that made President Biden the winner, cowered and then fled. So did Vice President Mike Pence, who just barely missed running into a group of rioters.
One woman was shot and killed as she and fellow rioters tried to break into an off-limits area near the House chamber, and the subsequent deaths of five police officers — one who suffered a stroke immediately after the riot and four by suicide within seven months of the riot — have been attributed to the stress and chaos of the day.
Democrats, who controlled both branches of Congress in the aftermath, announced a probe in the House. It was controversial from the start.
After Mrs. Pelosi announced its formation, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who was the GOP’s leader at the time, named hard-charging Republicans as his picks. Mrs. Pelosi refused to seat them, sparking a GOP boycott.
3Two anti-Trump Republicans did join, including Rep. Adam Kinzinger, and Ms. Cheney, who was named the panel’s vice chair.
Democratic members were Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, the Mississippi lawmaker who chaired the effort, and Reps. Zoe Lofgren, Adam Schiff and Pete Aguilar of California; Stephanie Murphy of Florida; Jamie Raskin of Maryland; and Elaine Luria of Virginia.
They concluded that while there were snafus with the police and Pentagon response, the fault for the day was mostly Mr. Trump’s. It was his resistance to the election results that spurred the crowd, his urging them to march to the Capitol, his purported attempts to join them, a failure to order better defenses in preparation for the day and a refusal to strenuously call for calm as the Capitol was being breached.
The characterizations of Mr. Trump’s resistance to the election results stand up, but some of the other claims have fared poorly under the scrutiny of the GOP’s probe.
Most crucially, Mr. Loudermilk said, Ms. Hutchison — the cornerstone of Democrats’ blame game — was shown to be unreliable. Her claims that Mr. Trump sided with rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence” and that he grabbed the steering wheel to try to force agents to take him to the Capitol both emerged only after Ms. Hutchison was conducting back-channel negotiations with Ms. Cheney.
And both claims have been refuted by those supposedly involved.
“The Select Committee chose to promote Hutchinson’s version of events — citing a series of other unnamed individuals who were further removed from the alleged incident than even Hutchinson — over that of two federal law enforcement agents who were the only possible eyewitnesses,” Mr. Loudermilk’s investigation concluded.
In one of the more bizarre instances, Ms. Hutchison falsely claimed to have drafted a handwritten note for White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the events of Jan. 6, he said.
Mr. Loudermilk hired a handwriting expert who concluded Ms. Hutchison didn’t write the note.
The GOP probe also concluded that the military intentionally delayed deploying the National Guard, despite Mr. Trump’s own Jan. 3 directive that the military give all necessary assistance.
According to then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, Mr. Trump said: “It’s going to be a large amount of protestors coming here on the 6th, and make sure that you have sufficient National Guard or Soldiers to make sure it’s a safe event.”
The acting defense secretary later said he considered those directives to be “throwaway lines.” And Pentagon leaders said they were worried about being seen as aiding Mr. Trump’s election resistance narrative.
Republicans say the Democrat-led probe also wrongly shielded Mrs. Pelosi from blame.
Ms. Pelosi’s own investigation uncovered video from an HBO documentary film crew, led by Mrs. Pelosi’s daughter, that captured the then-House speaker as she was being evacuated from the Capitol, saying, “I take responsibility” for not having the National Guard on hand.
“We have responsibility Terri,” she told her chief of staff, Terri McCullough. “We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have.”
Mr. Loudermilk’s investigation also chided the Democrats’ probe for not answering some key questions, such as who erected a gallows on the Capitol Grounds on Jan. 6.
He said there were several nearby offices with cameras that could have shed light on who the culprits were, but neither the FBI nor the Democrats’ select committee conducting the probe seemed to review the USCP CCTV footage. If they did, they never released information about when the gallows were built and who built them.
He also wondered how the gallows were allowed to be built — and to remain up for about 26 hours — despite being an illegal structure.
“It is inconceivable that gallows could be constructed on U.S. Capitol property and left up all day,” Mr. Loudermilk said. “These men arrived early in the morning, several hours before the rally even started or anyone had gathered, to construct the gallows platform, yet this structure was allowed to stay intact for all to see.”
Mr. Loudermilk also faulted the Democrats’ probe for its shoddy work, including failing to archive some of their work, such as videos of private interviews.
He said his team had to “re-do” much of the Democrats’ work to try to figure out how they made their claims.
Democrats said they turned over what they could, and said some of the materials weren’t archived because they weren’t required to be. In other cases, Democrats said the materials could have implicated national security or threatened witnesses’ safety.
A spokesman for Ms. Cheney didn’t respond to an inquiry for this story.
But after Mr. Loudermilk called for her to face criminal investigation for her role in the Jan. 6 probe, she released a statement saying Mr. Loudermilk’s report “intentionally disregards the truth” and “fabricates lies and defamatory allegations in an attempt to cover up what Donald Trump did.”
“Their allegations do not reflect a review of the actual evidence, and are a malicious and cowardly assault on the truth,” Ms. Cheney said.
The Washington Times has also reached out to the office of Mr. Thompson, the Democrat who led the original probe along with Ms. Cheney.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.