Quick Hit

The House Democrat-led Jan. 6 committee has been accused of withholding crucial evidence from the public, including witness interviews that contradicted the testimony of star witness Cassidy Hutchinson. House Republicans released a report on Monday, revealing these findings and more from their year-long probe into Capitol security failures on Jan. 6, 2021.

Key Details

• The report released information from the Secret Service driver who contradicted Hutchinson’s story about then-President Donald Trump trying to commandeer his presidential SUV and take it to the Capitol.
• The report concludes that Trump did instruct his staff ahead of Jan. 6 to offer 10,000 National Guard troops to the Capitol for extra security.
• The report also disputes Hutchinson’s story about the “hang Mike Pence” chants, with one anonymous White House employee testifying that neither the President nor any other staff made comments about those chants.

Diving Deeper

The House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, chaired by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., released its first findings from its year-long probe into Capitol security failures on Jan. 6, 2021, and the initial Democrat effort to investigate the incident. The report provided evidence contradicting several claims that Democrats made in their final report in December 2022.

For the first time, Loudermilk’s report released information from the Secret Service driver who took Trump to his Jan. 6, 2021 speech on the Ellipse and back to the White House. The driver, who wasn’t identified by name, directly contradicted Hutchinson’s story about Trump trying to grab the wheel of the presidential SUV and take it to the Capitol, the report said.

The report also concludes that Trump did, in fact, instruct his staff ahead of Jan. 6 to offer 10,000 National Guard troops to the Capitol for extra security and that the tragedy could have been prevented had Capitol Police, Washington D.C. officials and congressional leaders better heeded intelligence suggesting there would be violence that day.

The report also noted that multiple Secret Service employees, in addition to the driver and Ornato directly disputed Hutchinson’s now infamous account that Trump was so enraged after his speech on the Ellipse that he tried to commandeer his presidential SUV – known as the Beast – and force his detail to take him to the Capitol to join the rioters.

The report chided the Democrat committee for crediting Hutchinson’s account in the face of conflicting evidence. “The Select Committee said that it regarded both Hutchinson and the corroborating testimony by the White House employee with national security responsibilities as earnest and has no reason to conclude that either had a reason to invent their accounts,'” the report concluded. “However, as shown in the full transcribed interview of the White House employee with national security responsibilities, their testimony did not corroborate Hutchinson’s.

Witness interviews contained in the report also dispute Hutchinson’s story about the “hang Mike Pence” chants. In May 2022, Politico reported that a number of anonymous sources had confirmed that witnesses told the January 6 committee that then-President Trump expressed support for the chants of “Hang Mike Pence” that could be heard on that day. A Trump spokesperson vehemently denied this.

The subcommittee claims in its report the Jan. 6 select committee was highly selective in the information that it chose to release publicly at the conclusion of its investigation, choosing to release only information that supported the committee’s desired narrative, like Cassidy Hutchinson's updated testimony.

Further, the subcommittee report concludes the select committee failed to turn over significant tranches of data--and even deleted certain files--before the new Congress was sworn in. “[The] Select Committee failed to archive and subsequently provide the Subcommittee any of its video recordings of witness interviews, as many as 900 interview summaries or transcripts, more than one terabyte of digital data, and over 100 deleted or encrypted documents,” the report concluded.