Just after President Donald Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people for their crimes in connection to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, Speaker Mike Johnson, when asked to comment on the measure, said he wouldn’t “second guess” the president’s decision.
“The President made a decision, we move forward,” he said. “There are better days ahead of us … We’re not looking backward, we’re looking forward.”
Even so, the following day, the speaker announced that he was forming a select subcommittee under the House Judiciary Committee to investigate the attack on the Capitol. He formed it in order to investigate the failures of the Capitol police in securing the building that day and what many Republicans see as the flawed investigation by the initial select committee launched by Democrats.
Johnson announced that he would make Georgia Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk the chair of the subcommittee. He has previously investigated the Capitol attack during his time as chair of the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Administration Committee. Loudermilk said earlier this month “You’ve got to look backward to look forward,” in an apparent attempt to square the speaker’s opposing comments.
Loudermilk said an important job for the committee will be to look at “significant changes in how we secure this building and how we secure the people that are here, and also member security, and also looking at the number of intelligence failures that we have found,” according to Politico.
In December, Loudermilk shared his second “interim report on the failures and politicization of the January 6 Select Committee.”
The ranking member on the House Administration Committee, New York Democrat Joe Morelle, put out his own report as a refutation of Loudermilk’s on January 5.
Dan Wolfensperger, who spent 28 years in Congress as a staffer, wrote in an op-ed for The Hill that the creation of the subcommittee comes after a “prolonged obsession” with what happened on January 6, 2021, “fueled by Trump’s repeated stoking of accusations that the other party is spreading false narratives that he was solely to blame for the riot.”
He added that it “has confused and conflated events in order to pin the tail on the opposing party’s mascot.”
Wolfensperger went on to say that Johnson likely created the subcommittee “to take some of the onus off Trump for vowing throughout the campaign (and before) that he would vigorously pursue and prosecute his accusers at the Justice Department and on the original Jan. 6 select committee.”
While Johnson has promised Loudermilk his support and significant funding for the panel, former President Joe Biden’s preemptive pardons of the previous select committee’s members and Department of Justice prosecutors have frustrated Loudermilk’s expected actions.
When asked if any Democrats would serve on the committee, Rep. Jim Jordan told reporters “you’d have to ask” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Wolfensperger posited that one of Loudermilk’s “central aims” has been to persuade the FBI to prosecute former Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney for speaking to former Trump White House aide and top January 6 committee witness Cassidy Hutchinson without her attorney being present.
The speaker’s suggestion for a select subcommittee has to be authorized by the House before a chair and its members can be named before it can go up against other subcommittees for funding.
