With the federal government now officially shut down, the House of Representatives has a lot of time on its hands. All the action is now centered in the Senate, where all but three members of the Democratic caucus are refusing to go along with Republicans to pass the House’s continuing resolution that would reopen the government and extend funding at current levels until Nov. 21.
House Democrats have made a point of staying in Washington, D.C., to continue working. Meanwhile, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana sent his caucus home to wait out the shutdown — and to apparently avoid swearing in newly elected Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who represents the final vote needed to pass a discharge petition requiring the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
While Senate Republicans refuse to negotiate with their Democratic counterparts on extending health subsidies to reopen the government, the House could spend this time going over the Epstein files with a fine-tooth comb to get to the bottom of what appears to be the biggest sex trafficking scandal in American history. But the president has made it clear that’s not going to happen.
Instead, some Republicans members are likely preparing for another game of smoke-and-mirrors when the shutdown is over: Rewriting the narrative of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.
Instead, some Republicans members are likely preparing for another game of smoke-and-mirrors when the shutdown is over: Rewriting the narrative of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.
Since we all saw what happened in real time on live television, this may mark their most ambitious attempt yet to bend reality to President Donald Trump’s will. But it’s not simply about satisfying the president. House Republicans seem intent on revenge.
According to POLITICO, the GOP caucus is still seething over the original investigation by the Jan. 6 select committee, which was largely composed of Democrats and implicated Trump in the violence and destruction perpetrated by his supporters. The original committee, led by Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, “was rigged,” according to Johnson.
The new probe, the speaker said, would be “a committee investigating the previous committee” led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga, who apparently seems to think that nobody really understands what happened. “We need to look at it from a factual standpoint,” Loudermilk told POLITICO. “It’s dangerous out there. There were a lot of civilians, as well as members of Congress and staff and even press that were here on Jan. 6. And I think we’re all interested to know, why did the Capitol get breached — regardless of who did it — how did it get breached?”
I’m pretty sure we know how and why it happened. We all saw it with our own eyes, and there are hours of horrific video footage from nearly every possible angle. Trump’s followers were all worked up over his big lie that the 2020 election had been stolen by President-elect Joe Biden and the Democrats. As Trump spoke to the crowd that day on the Ellipse, he told them that unless Mike Pence, his own vice president, “did the right thing,” they were going to be cheated out of their right to have the president they wanted. He said they could go to the Capitol to make their wishes known, and he indicated that he might join them.
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They were listening. After Trump departed, the crowd marched to the Capitol and broke into the building. They breached security barriers and violently assaulted police, forcing members of Congress and their staffers to evacuate the Capitol complex. While Trump — and all of us — watched on television, they desecrated the world’s greatest shrine to democracy and succeeded in delaying the legal certification of the presidential election.
There is no mystery to be uncovered.
Besides the findings of the Jan. 6 committee, there have been investigations into the security concerns around that day from the Capitol Police inspector general, a bipartisan Senate investigation and an outside review led by retired Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré.
But Loudermilk is partially justifying his ongoing obsession about Jan. 6 as if there was some dark cover-up. As chair of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, he’s been working the angles on this story since 2023, claiming that he couldn’t get the cooperation he needed to really get to the bottom of it. Trump, apparently, finally listened, and the White House stepped in to push a reportedly reluctant Johnson to convene a new select subcommittee that will give Loudermilk subpoena power.
Both Trump and Johnson have recently been touting a misleading report from a right-wing source that 274 FBI agents were “secretly placed” in the crowd to agitate the otherwise peaceful protesters into storming the Capitol. This would, of course, relieve Trump of any responsibility for the violence and mayhem that ensued. But as POLITICO reported, the Justice Department’s inspector general revealed ten months ago that the agents were dispatched after the riot had started — and only to support the Capitol Police in attempting to contain the crowd.
I can’t imagine why the administration would consider it a good idea to dredge up the nation’s collective memory of Trump’s worst day in office, when he was truly toxic for a brief moment in time. Since he announced his first bid for the presidency in 2015, Trump has exhibited a remarkable ability to make a lot of people believe a demonstrably untrue narrative if he repeats it often enough.
But not this time.
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