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Republicans Launch Yet Another Jan. 6 Committee

WASHINGTON — Republican efforts to formally rewrite the history of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — and President Donald Trump’s role in it — are poised to reach dizzying new heights.

Though House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) first announced that a new Jan. 6 committee would be formed seven months ago, it was not until Wednesday that House Republicans quietly passed authorization for a new committee in a procedural vote tied to wholly unrelated measures.

Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), who chaired a similar committee in the previous Congress, is set to lead the new panel. “We were just cracking open some new information when it ended last time,” Loudermilk said, such as new details about paid FBI informants who’d been in contact with rioters. The Justice Department’s inspector general said in December 2024 that FBI informants were on the scene, but played no role in orchestrating the riot.

HuffPost asked Loudermilk if he contends that Trump supporters did not attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to disrupt the certification of Trump’s election loss the previous November. He stammered in response.

“I have not seen — well, I mean, you got to define the president’s support, you know, Trump supporter. Was he engaged in it? We’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that he was engaged in that,” Loudermilk said.

To recap: Trump lied about election fraud for months, told his supporters to come to Washington for a “wild” rally, told them to “fight like hell” during a speech near the White House, then told them to go to the Capitol, where they fought like hell against police, breached the building and sent lawmakers — and then-Vice President Mike Pence — scurrying into undisclosed locations.

And as for any “evidence” that Trump was involved in efforts to stop the certification of former President Joe Biden’s victory, the opportunity for the public to learn more was mostly foreclosed on after Trump won the 2024 election. With the sweeping immunity granted to presidents by the Supreme Court, special counsel Jack Smith’s probe on the subject was quickly shuttered.

Democrats didn’t hesitate to state the obvious: The Republican Jan. 6 committee is an effort to rewrite history.

“They’re trying to pretend that the mob didn’t attack on January 6,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a member of the original Jan. 6 committee, told HuffPost. “I guess they think the American people must be stupid, because we on the committee did an extensive bipartisan report, and then we posted the findings everywhere.”

Another former member of the original Jan. 6 committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), said he would happily serve on the new panel, which is a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee.

“They have not laid a glove on a single factual finding of the Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, and so all they are doing is giving us the opportunity to educate younger generations of Americans about what happens when you listen to an authoritarian who wants to disregard the rule of law,” Raskin told HuffPost.

A resolution for the new committee describes it as an effort to investigate the “remaining questions surrounding Jan. 6, 2021,”a curious label since Republicans in 2021 balked at setting up the sort of bipartisan fact-finding commission Congress usually creates after major disasters.

Andmany House Republicans, when given the chance to cooperate voluntarily with the original Jan. 6 select committee, by and large refused to do so — even when formally subpoenaed. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) chose two Republican members for the committee: then-Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). Both have since been drummed out of the Republican Party.

Loudermilk found himself briefly scrutinized by the original Jan. 6 committee after security footage from Jan. 5 emerged showing what committee members said appeared to be the lawmaker giving an apparent “reconnaissance” tour to a small group of Trump supporters inside the Capitol complex. Some of his guests were at the rally the next day, but weren’t charged with crimes; Capitol Police said nothing was suspicious about the tour.

One of Loudermilk’s visitors, however, did turn up in video footage acquired by the committee. Loudermilk’s guest filmed another man wielding a sharpened flagpole as they walked toward Trump’s rally, and when the flagpole-wielding man said the makeshift weapon was “for a certain person,” Loudermilk’s visitor replied: “That’s right. That’s for somebody special.” Later that day, Loudermilk’s visitor walked toward the Capitol and filmed himself threatening to pull lawmakers out of the Capitol by “their hairs.”

Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) is seen outside of a House Republican Caucus meeting on Capitol Hill on Dec. 4, 2024.

Loudermilk’s run-in with the original Jan. 6 committee led to his interest in leading a counter committee. He told HuffPost last year he was tapped for the job “because I had first-hand experience of how the select committee cherry-picked and manipulated information to come up with a false narrative.”

Lofgren said Loudermilk never answered the committee’s questions about his tour, which was not included in the final report.

“All we asked was, ‘Who is this guy, how did this happen?’” Lofgren said. “He never answered.”

This week, Loudermilk insisted there are important questions remaining about how the Capitol was breached — questions that have nothing to do with Donald Trump, of course.

“My focus has always been, ‘How were they able to breach this Capitol?’ That should have never happened with the intelligence resources that we have, the number of law enforcement resources we have in this town. How in the world did that happen? That’s what I’m focused on,” Loudermilk said.

A report from Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in 2023 found that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security overlooked a number of tips about looming violence on Jan. 6, particularly those coming from far-right extremists like the Proud Boys.

While some intelligence agencies were aware of calls to violence proliferating on social media from those groups, as well as thousands of individuals, the intelligence community didn’t see the threats as “credible.” The 2023 report showed that most agencies “failed to fully and accurately assess the severity of the threat identified by that intelligence, and formally disseminate guidance to their law enforcement partners.”