(RightWing.org) – More than three years after the January 6 riots at the Capitol, the scandal continues to generate new plot twists. Now it’s emerged that the former House committee investigating the incident deleted a batch of encrypted files days before they had to hand them over to Republicans. Those files have now been recovered — but their contents are still hidden.
For 18 months, from July 2021 to January 2023, the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack made regular headlines with its probe into former president Donald Trump’s alleged role in the Capitol riot. That came to an end after the midterm elections when the Republicans gained a majority in the House. The Select Committee wound itself up and prepared to hand over to a new panel led by the GOP. The committee chair, Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) apparently told Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), who chairs the new committee set up to continue the investigation, that he would hand over four terabytes of data — but less than three terabytes were turned over.
Suspicious, Loudermilk hired a digital forensics team to investigate the former committee’s hard drives and discovered that 117 encrypted files had been deleted — just days before they should have been handed over. Loudermilk’s tech experts have now managed to recover all the deleted files, and they’ve already gleaned information from them. One of the files has already revealed testimony from someone whose name isn’t included in the Select Committee’s official archives.
There’s a problem; though; most of the files are password-protected, and the new panel doesn’t have the passwords. Loudermilk has now written to Thompson, asking him to provide the passwords so the information can be properly archived. At the same time, he’s also written to House officials requesting the full, “unedited and unredacted” transcripts of the testimony given by White House and Homeland Security officials.
Loudermilk told journalists it’s clear that the previous committee was trying to hide some of the evidence it had collected — and Thompson and renegade former GOP congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WA) had broken House rules by failing to archive all their information. Perhaps now the full truth about January 6 will come out.
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