Jan. 6 Committee Caught Deleting Files Before GOP House Takeover

House investigators examining the violence that occurred on January 6, 2021, are presently trying to recover 117 encrypted files that the House Select Jan. 6 Committee erased before Republicans took control of the chamber last year.

The House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight’s digital forensics team recovered the password-protected files and determined that the data deletion occurred on January 1, 2023. It was Fox News that first broke the news of the find.

The panel’s head, Republican Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, has contacted Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi and the previous chair of the House Jan. 6 Committee, to request access to the information.

The hard disks kept by the Select Committee and the Clerk of the House only hold fewer than three terabytes of material, while Thompson claimed to have delivered four terabytes of digital information, according to Loudermilk.

He told Thompson that his subcommittee had found some digital documents on hard drives that the Select Committee had archived and asked for a list of passwords to examine the data and ensure they were archiving correctly.

A retrieved file identified a witness whose testimony was missing from the archives of the Select Committee, and Loudermilk pointed out that Thompson had before admitted that not all documents were kept.

The source claims that the Clerk of the House did not keep some supplementary information, including transcripts of interviews and depositions.

Additional letters have been written by Loudermilk to the White House Counsel’s Office and the Department of Homeland Security demanding the original transcripts of the testimony.

By January 24th, he wanted everyone to have complied with his request.

Loudermilk asked Thompson to provide the passwords to all the files the Select Committee had encrypted. His committee needs this to view the files and ensure they are archived correctly.