House Jan. 6 Committee deleted more than 100 encrypted files days before GOP took majority: sources
Fox News Digital learned that the former House Select Committee deleted on Jan. 6, more than 100 files encrypted from its investigation just days before Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives.
Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga) is the chairman of the Oversight Subcommittee, which will investigate Jan. 6, 2021. The panel will investigate the failures of security on that date, as well the “actions’ of the former Select Committee investigating the Capitol Riot.
Loudermilk told Fox News Digital last week that his investigation had entered a new phase, with the renewed support of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La. ), who has allocated additional resources to investigate.
According to sources familiar with Loudermilk’s investigation, Fox News Digital reported that per House rules the former select panel, which was headed by Rep. Bennie Thomson, D-Miss. was required to hand over all documents relating to its investigation to a new GOP-led committee after Republicans gained majority in the House of Representatives at the midterm elections of 2022.
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Fox News Digital reported that Thompson told Loudermilk the select committee was going to turn over 4 terabytes (terabytes) of archived data. However, the new committee received only two terabytes.
Fox News Digital learned that Loudermilk’s committee hired a team of digital forensics to scrape hard disks to determine the information they weren’t given.
According to sources familiarized with the search, the forensics team determined that 117 documents were both encrypted and deleted. Sources claim that the files were deleted Jan. 1, 2023, just days before Thompson’s team had to transfer the data.
Fox News Digital learned that the forensics group has recovered all of the 117 encrypted and deleted files. Loudermilk demands answers and passwords in order to access the data.
Loudermilk wrote: “As you admitted in your letter dated July 7, 2023, the Select Committee (which investigated the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2012) failed to archive all Committee Records as required by House Rules.” You wrote that you sent specific transcripts of interviews and depositions, but didn’t archive them at the Clerk of House.
Loudermilk also added that Thompson “also claimed that you turned over 4 terabytes digital files but the hard disks archived by Select Committee with Clerk of the House contained less than 3 terabytes data.”
Loudermilk said that after performing a forensics analysis on the data and hard drives of the Select Committee, he had been able to recover ‘numerous digital recordings from the hard drives archived.
Loudermilk wrote that “one recovered file revealed the identity of a person whose testimony had not been archived by Select Committee.” “Furthermore, we discovered that the majority of recovered files were password-protected. This prevented us from being able to determine what they contained.”
Loudermilk requested that Thompson give him a “list of passwords for password-protected documents created by the Select Committee”, so that his committee could “access these documents and ensure that they are properly archived”.
Loudermilk sent letters to the White House General Counsel and the General Counsel of the Department of Homeland Security requesting the “unedited, unredacted transcripts of White House and DHS’s testimony before the former Select Committee.”
Loudermilk’s Committee knows that these transcripts exist but claims they weren’t turned over by Thompson-led committee.
Loudermilk asked that the White House and DHS meet his request before January 24.
It’s clear that Pelosi’s Select Committee took great measures to keep Americans from viewing certain documents in their investigation. Loudermilk said that it appears Bennie Thompson, Liz Cheney and others were trying to obstruct the Subcommittee’s work by not preserving critical information and videos in accordance with House rules.
“The American People deserve to know the whole truth. Speaker Johnson has empowered to me to use any tool necessary to retrieve these documents in order to get the truth. And I will.”
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