J6 committee failed to properly preserve records on hearings, security failures at Capitol: House GOP

The chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight for the Committee on House Administration looking into the security failures on January 6, 2021, Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), revealed this week that the now-disbanded "J6" committee failed to adequately preserve documents, data, and video depositions in accordance with the law and House rules. 

According to a letter obtained by Fox News between Loudermilk and the former chairman of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th attack on the capital, Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS), 4 terabytes of data were supposedly handed over, but Loudermilk told the outlet his committee only received 2.5 terabytes. 

Thompson acknowledged in the footnote of the letter that "Consistent with guidance from the Office of the Clerk and other authorities, the Select Committee did not archive temporary committee records that were not elevated by the Committee’s actions, such as use in hearings or official publications, or those that did not further its investigative activities."

Loudermilk told the outlet, "He's saying they decided they didn't have to" turn over all the documents. "It was clear in law they had to especially and, I mean if there was any question, the fact that they used the videos in the hearings would dictate that it had to be preserved. The more we go in the more we're realizing that there are things that we don't have. We don't have anything about security failures at the Capitol, we don't have the videos of the depositions," he added. 

"Part of our task as this oversight subcommittee is to actually address the security failures, look into how did it happen… how were these folks able to get into the Capitol," Loudermilk said of their investigation. "Nothing was indexed. There was no table of contents index. Usually, when you conduct this level of investigation, you use a database system and everything is digitized, and indexed. We got nothing like that. We just got raw data." 

"So it took us a long time going through it and one thing I started realizing is we don't have anything much at all from the Blue Team," he added. The blue team referenced was a team in the J6 committee that investigated the security failures. 

"We've got lots of depositions, we've got lots of subpoenas, we've got video and other documents provided through subpoenas by individuals," he continued. "But we're not seeing anything from the Blue Team as far as reports on the investigation they did looking into the actual breach itself." 

Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund initially asserted that the FBI withheld intelligence of violent threats leading up to the January 6, 2021, riot. He found out the day before a hearing in February 2021, that the Capital Police Department (CPD) was given reports the night of January 5, but that they didn't make it to leadership. 

A Republican-led investigation concluded last year, "Leadership and law enforcement failures within the US Capitol left the complex vulnerable on January 6, 2021." It continued, "The Democrat-led investigation in the House of Representatives, however, has disregarded those institutional failings that exposed the Capitol to violence that day."