The tone and tenor of the investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol attack will likely change in the new year when House Republicans take control of the lower chamber of Congress, pivoting from blaming former President Donald Trump to focusing on security lapses.
House Republicans are expected to release a roughly 100-page rebuttal to the Jan. 6 committee’s final report in the coming days. It will attempt to peg the Capitol breach on security issues and minimize the role Trump and his allies had in inciting an insurrection.
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Last month, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who is trying to secure enough votes to become the next speaker of the House, sent a letter to the special committee scrutinizing the 2021 attack and said Republicans were preparing to launch their own investigation into what happened and instructed the panel to preserve all of its interviews and notes. The move is the first concrete step taken by the GOP to counter the findings of the nearly two-year bipartisan deep dive into the events leading up to and including what took place on Jan. 6.
McCarthy, one of Trump’s strongest allies in Congress, has also pledged to hold public hearings in which security missteps and the communication breakdown will be discussed at length.
McCarthy claimed in his Nov. 30 letter to Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) that the committee had “no visibility into the totality of the investigation” and that “entire swaths of findings will be left out of the committee’s final report.”
“You have spent a year and a half and millions of taxpayers’ dollars conducting this investigation,” he wrote. “It is imperative that all information collected be preserved not just for institutional prerogatives but for transparency to the American people.”
McCarthy added that “although your committee’s public hearings did not focus on why the Capitol complex was not secure on January 6, 2021, the Republican majority in the 118th Congress will hold hearings that do so.”
Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), the leader of a GOP “shadow group” investigating the Jan. 6 riot, told Axios that the group’s report will focus on security failures, including the Capitol Police‘s and the FBI‘s “gathering and dissemination” of information as well as “the insufficient training and equipment give to law enforcement.” Banks said his group had interviewed Capitol Police officers.
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He also questioned the committee’s motives, claiming its primary goal has been to make Trump look bad as some sort of political payback.
The Washington Post reported in November that several committee staff members were upset after they were told much of their work would be excluded from the final report or mentioned in an appendix and that the final findings would “focus almost entirely on Trump.”
The report is expected to scale back information that examined the financing of the Jan. 6 riot as well as the role militia groups and extremism played in the unprecedented attack that unfolded as lawmakers were trying to certify the 2020 presidential election results.
“We all came from prestigious jobs, dropping what we were doing because we were told this would be an important fact-finding investigation that would inform the public,” one former committee staffer told the Washington Post. “But when [the committee] became a [Rep. Liz Cheney] 2024 campaign, many of us became discouraged.”
Cheney’s spokesman Jeremy Adler pushed back strongly on the allegations, claiming that some staff members “submitted subpar material for the report that reflects long-held liberal biases about federal law enforcement, Republicans, and sociological issues outside the scope of the select committee’s work.”
Cheney is one of two Republicans on the committee and has not been shy about blaming Trump.
Tim Mulvey, the select committee’s spokesman, called the efforts of the panel’s work “historic” and said the findings would not be “changed by a handful of disgruntled staff who are uninformed about many parts of the committee’s ongoing work.”
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The House Jan. 6 subcommittee held its final public meeting Monday afternoon. In an extraordinary step, the committee referred Trump to the Justice Department to face criminal charges, accusing him of conspiring against the government to overturn the election and of fomenting an insurrection.
The committee also previewed the final report with a 161-page executive summary. The full report, along with attachments that include a look into security failures, will be released Wednesday.
