Nothing says 'legitimate investigation' like deleting deposition videos, withholding exculpatory footage, and now - deleting encrypted files. Which is exactly what the assholes below did, just days before Republicans retook the majority in the House.
According to Fox News Digital, the former House Select Committee on Jan. 6 deleted more than 100 encrypted files from its probe just days before they handed over the chamber to Republicans.
Now, the Republican-led House Oversight Subcommittee investigating the Jan. 6 committee and security failures on that day, reveals that evidence was destroyed.
Sources close to Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) who's leading the new investigation told Fox News that per House rules, the former select committee, chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MI), was required to turn over all documents from its investigation. Thompson reportedly said he'd turn over four terabytes of archived data.
This turned into less than three terabytes of data, prompting Loudermilk's committee to hire a digital forensics team to scrape hard drives to determine what's missing, the NY Post reports.
The team determined that 117 files were both encrypted and deleted on Jan. 1, 2023, just days before Thompson's team was required to transmit the data to the new committee. The forensics team was able to recover all 117 deleted files, and Loudermilk wants answers.
"As you acknowledged in your July 7, 2023 letter, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (Select Committee) did not archive all Committee records as required by House Rules," reads a letter from Loudermilk to Thompson, reviewed by Fox News. "You wrote that you sent specific transcribed interviews and depositions to the White House and Department of Homeland Security but did not archive them with the Clerk of the House."
According to Loudermilk, Thompson also "claimed that you turned over 4-terabytes of digital files, but the hard drives archived by the Select Committee with the Clerk of the House contain less than 3- terabytes of data."
The forensics team recovered "numerous digital records from hard drives archived by the Select Committee," the letter continues.
"One recovered file disclosed the identity of an individual whose testimony was not archived by the Select Committee," Loudermilk wrote. "Further, we found that most of the recovered files are password-protected, preventing us from determining what they contain."
Loudermilk has demanded "a list of passwords for all password-protected files created by the Select Committee" so that his committee can "access these files and ensure they are properly archived."
Good luck with that.
"It’s obvious that Pelosi’s Select Committee went to great lengths to prevent Americans from seeing certain documents produced in their investigation. It also appears that Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney intended to obstruct our Subcommittee by failing to preserve critical information and videos as required by House rules," Loudermilk told Fox News Digital, adding "The American people deserve to know the full truth, and Speaker Johnson has empowered me to use all tools necessary to recover these documents to get the truth, and I will."
