Former House Committee Deleted and Encrypted Over 100 January 6 Files

Over 100 files relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol protest investigation were deleted and encrypted on Jan. 1, 2023, by the former House Select Committee just days before Republicans took over the investigation, Fox News reported on Monday. The files have been recovered, but passwords still block access to some of the data.

Missing data: After Republicans gained the majority in the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections, the former House Select Committee on January 6 was required to hand over all documents from its investigation.

Former Select Committee chairman Bennie Thompson told new chairman Barry Loudermilk that 4 terabytes of archived data would be turned over. But the new committee only received about 2 terabytes of data.

Loudermilk’s committee then hired a digital forensics team to scrape hard drives to find the missing data. The forensic team found 117 deleted and encrypted files.

Unarchived: In a letter to Thompson, Loudermilk pointed out that Thompson had admitted that his Select Committee “did not archive all committee records as required by House rules.”

You wrote that you sent specific transcribed interviews and depositions to the White House and Department of Homeland Security but did not archive them with the clerk of the House.

Loudermilk said one of the files the forensic team recovered “disclosed the identity of an individual whose testimony was not archived by the Select Committee.”

Passwords: “Further, we found that most of the recovered files are password protected, preventing us from determining what they contain,” Loudermilk wrote.

Loudermilk has asked Thompson to provide him “a list of passwords for all password-protected files created by the Select Committee,” and requested “unedited and unredacted transcripts” of White House and Department of Homeland Security testimony to the former Select Committee.

It’s obvious that Pelosi’s Select Committee went to great lengths to prevent Americans from seeing certain documents produced in their investigation. It also appears that Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney intended to obstruct our Subcommittee by failing to preserve critical information and videos as required by House rule.
—Barry Loudermilk

Destroying evidence: In August, Trumpet executive editor Stephen Flurry wrote in his article “January 6 Was a Setup”:

It seems evident that radical liberals on the January 6 Committee are trying to hide the same thing that radical liberals at the top of the fbi and in the ownership suites of the media are trying to hide: Federal operatives had the decisive role in the false-flag operation against Trump in an attempt to cover up the stolen election. Special prosecutor Jack Smith is trying to frame Donald Trump while the January 6 Committee destroys the evidence that could prove him innocent.

Learn more: Read “Stolen Election, Fake Insurrection.”