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Top Democrat On J6 Committee: We Actually Didn’t Review Any Of The Surveillance Video


BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | MARCH 09, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/09/top-democrat-on-j6-committee-we-actually-didnt-review-any-of-the-surveillance-video/

Bennie Thompson

After Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired Capitol surveillance footage this week exposing yet more falsehood from the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 and leaving Democrats and their media allies irate, the committee chair on Wednesday said the panel never actually analyzed the crucial footage.

On Monday’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News aired the footage of the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, undermining the select committee’s narrative of a “deadly insurrection.” Given access to the video by Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Carlson’s team reviewed over 40,000 hours of footage, which offered proof the committee manipulated audio and video to dramatize the riot for its made-for-TV hearings in an election year.

But in a Wednesday night statement to CNN, select committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., claimed the panel never analyzed the blockbuster footage Fox News aired this week.

“I’m not actually aware of any member of the committee who had access,” Thompson said. “We had a team of employees who kind of went through the video.”

Hiring investigators who “kind of went through the video” doesn’t sound like a very thorough investigation.

However, Thompson’s admission that his committee lacked due diligence makes no sense. Since when do lawmakers have no access to the same material as their own staffers? Did none of the nine panel members view the footage that was played for the cameras? Does Thompson not know who had access to the tapes? Was it just the former television executives they hired to produce their show trials? Either Thompson is lying and knows exactly who had access, or he handed the key to Vice Chair Liz Cheney and had nothing to do with it while the committee leaked exclusives to CNN.

Thompson’s office did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s inquiries.

The committee clearly had access to the footage Carlson aired this week that contradicted the panel’s key narratives. After all, members of the committee endlessly bragged about how many documents, more than 35,000, investigators reviewed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who used the committee to dodge responsibility for her own failure to secure the Capitol, just refused to make the tapes public — and after Carlson’s revelations, it’s clear why.

Carlson’s program showed that the man who became the face of the “insurrection,” known as the “QAnon Shaman,” was given VIP treatment by police. The tapes showed since-deceased Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick walking around “vigorously” after altercations with protesters who had allegedly murdered him. The footage also showed that mysterious rioter Ray Epps lied to congressional investigators about his whereabouts the day of the riot, yet the committee protected the “insurrectionist.”

On Monday, Carlson announced his team discovered proof that Democrats on Pelosi’s probe came across the same footage Fox made public.

“We can be sure because the footage contains an electronic bookmark that is still archived in the Capitol’s computer system,” said Carlson. “That means that investigators working for the Democratic Party saw this tape. They saw it, but they refused to release the tape to the public.”

Committee staffers even used some of the footage to show Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., allegedly fleeing the Capitol. All Carlson did was extend the footage a few seconds longer than what was televised in the committee’s show-trial hearings, and it became clear Hawley departed the Capitol along with other members of Congress. The clip published by the committee was always demonstrably dishonest.

[WATCH: J6 Tapes Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

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Jan. 6 Committee Avoids Probing Security Failures as Hearing Finally Covers Capitol Riot


REPORTED BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | JULY 13, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/13/jan-6-committee-avoids-probing-security-failures-as-hearing-finally-covers-capitol-riot/

Jan. 6 Hearing

Why is the Jan. 6 committee soliciting testimony from former D.C. government employees instead of the Capitol Police Intelligence Unit?

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The House Select Committee on Jan. 6 finally devoted a major portion of a hearing in its summer show trial series to the violence at the Capitol. After again re-establishing that members of the Trump White House were divided over the Republican president’s challenges to the 2020 election, lawmakers spent the second half of Tuesday’s hearing on the turmoil from more than 18 months ago.

“We settle our differences at the ballot box,” Committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said during his opening of proceedings in which a fellow panel member, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-M.d., led the questioning of two repentant rioters who illegally entered the Capitol. Just five years ago, Raskin spearheaded efforts to overturn the 2016 election results as one of his first actions in Congress, objecting to the certification over made-up narratives of Trump-Russia collusion.

Over the course of Tuesday’s hearing, lawmakers sought to paint former President Donald Trump as guilty of coordinating an assault on the Capitol, which began well before he had finished his speech at the White House. At one point, the panel featured an unsent tweet from the president urging supporters to “March to the Capitol,” as incriminating evidence. The post loses its shock value, however, when one acknowledges that Trump said plainly to those gathered at the Ellipse to head toward the Capitol and protest “peacefully.” Quite the bombshell.

“I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” Trump said.

For all its redundancy in its desperate attempt to smear political dissidents as violent “insurrectionists” ahead of the fall midterms, the Jan. 6 Committee’s latest hearing offered the most information yet about the telegraphing and public planning in the run-up to the Capitol riot. The proceedings, on the other hand, came complete not with testimony from senior officials in charge of Capitol security, but instead from an anonymous Twitter employee and former D.C. Chief of Homeland Security and Intelligence Donell Harvin.

In a pre-recorded clip played during the hearing, Harvin told lawmakers his division received information “suggesting that some very, very violent individuals were organizing to come to D.C. and not only were they organizing to come to D.C., but these groups, these nonaligned groups, were aligning. All the red flags went up at that point.”

“When you have armed militia collaborating with white supremacy groups collaborating with conspiracy theory groups online all towards a common goal, you start seeing what we call in terrorism, ‘a blended ideology,’” Harvin added. “And that’s a very, very bad sign.”

Harvin said groups went beyond casual chatter and began coordinating specifics.

The committee’s anonymous Twitter employee, meanwhile, testified that the company was concerned about the potential for violence on Jan. 6.

“I don’t know that I slept that night [Jan. 5, 2021] to be honest with you,” the employee said. “I was on pins and needles, because again, for months, I had been begging and anticipating and attempting to raise the reality that, if we made no intervention into what I saw occurring, people were going to die.”

Twitter fostered the same type of user riot planning that Silicon Valley tech giants cited to justify their collective purge of rival app Parler from their online services shortly after the riot.

Tuesday’s testimony raised more questions than answers and reinforced existing questions about the Capitol security failures under the leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who six times turned down requests for the deployment of the National Guard, according to former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund.

Why didn’t Pelosi’s House Sergeant at Arms approve requests for National Guard assistance? According to The Washington Post, “Harvin’s team set up a call with analysts at the Capitol Police.” Why did the U.S. Capitol Police Intelligence Unit “not warn its officers or law enforcement partners of the gravity of the threat” as outlined by a Senate report last summer? Why didn’t the Jan. 6 Committee ask Harvin about the Capitol Police’s failure to heed his warnings? And why is the committee soliciting testimony from former D.C. government employees instead of the Capitol Police Intelligence Unit? We all know the answer to the last two.

Devoid of opposition, the committee is operating for the sole purpose of expunging its political enemies from public life, and that means doing everything in its power to present a curated narrative. Panel member Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., admitted that much on CNN on Sunday when she said on national television that the committee was uninterested in corroborating blockbuster claims left unverified at best.

“We never call in witnesses to corroborate other witnesses or to give their reaction to other witnesses,” Lofgren said.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

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Only 10 Percent of J6 Committee Subpoenas Relate to the Capitol Riot


REPORTED BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | JANUARY 20, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/20/only-10-percent-of-j6-committee-subpoenas-relate-to-the-capitol-riot/

Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson

The House Select Committee established to probe the Capitol riot is not interested in probing the Capitol riot. According to a Federalist analysis of the 84 subpoenas publicly issued by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Select Committee on Jan. 6, only 8 have targeted individuals or groups with any connection to the Capitol riot. The rest have taken aim at former government officials and private citizens in a smear campaign for exercising their constitutional right to protest.

The 84 subpoenas do not include the more than 100 seeking the telephone records of individuals whose identities remain under seal, both from the public and from those whose privacy the committee seeks to violate.

“Every member of this committee is dedicated to conducting a non-partisan, professional, and thorough investigation of all the relevant facts regarding January 6th,” said Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney upon accepting Pelosi’s appointment as vice chair. “We owe it to the American people to investigate everything that led up to and transpired on January 6th.”

Except the committee absent of Republican-appointments at Pelosi’s direction is far from non-partisan, and the probe’s investigation is far from focused on the security failures at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Born in the ashes of a 9/11-style commission blocked by Republicans when Democrats refused a genuine investigation of violence on Capitol Hill, Pelosi’s Select Committee on Jan. 6 has remained faithful to its central purpose. That purpose is seeking retribution against political dissidents while offering a smokescreen to Pelosi’s own culpability in her failures to reinforce Capitol security. Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., made that much clear last summer in an interview with CNN.

“If you look at the charge that we have in the resolution, it says the facts and circumstances around January 6. I don’t see the speaker being part and parcel to that,” Thompson said.

According to Thompson, Pelosi’s apparent refusal to approve activation of the National Guard not once, but six times, according to testimony from former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, fails to fall under the umbrella of “facts and circumstances around January 6.”

Meanwhile, federal agencies run by Democrats have colluded with Pelosi’s deputies in the House to block a genuine investigation of the security failures at the Capitol by Republican lawmakers kicked from the speaker’s select panel.

Earlier this month, House Republicans penned a letter to Pelosi outlining at least four times last year the speaker’s deputies denied to provide records shedding light on the security decisions of Jan. 6.

“There is irony in the fact that the same time House Democrats are holding witnesses in criminal contempt of Congress for raising genuine questions of legal privilege,” wrote Illinois Rep. Rodney Davis, “you continue to obstruct Republican access to House records relating to the security preparedness of the Capitol complex.”

In October, the FBI similarly stonewalled GOP lawmakers who requested the same briefing given to members of the Select Committee.

Out of the 84 subpoenas issued by the panel, for which its authority remains questionable after Pelosi barred GOP appointments, at least one targeted a private citizen with no connection to any of the events on Jan. 6, whether it be the turmoil at the Capitol or the Trump rally at the White House.

Andrew Surabian, a Republican operative working to unseat Cheney in Wyoming, was subpoenaed by the lawmaker’s committee last week.

“During the time period that the rally was being organized, Mr. Surabian was overseeing a Super PAC in support of Republican Senate candidates in Georgia,” Surabian attorney Daniel Bean said in a statement. “Mr. Surabian is a close friend to Donald Trump Jr. and is running a Super PAC that opposes the reelection of one of the members of the committee. Accordingly, we believe this is nothing more than harassment of the Committee’s political opponents and is un-American to the core.”

Eight subpoenas from the committee have sought information more directly related to the Capitol unrest, including subpoenas to three right-wing groups and their leaders. Proud Boys International LLC, Oath Keepers, 1st Amendment Praetorian, and each of their chairmen have been summoned by the probe.

On Wednesday, Nicholas Fuentes and Patrick Casey of the America First Movement were handed subpoenas based on the committee’s suspicions of involvement in the chaos that unfolded at the Capitol.

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