House Republicans are attempting to pass a new rule that would prevent the materials compiled by the House Select Committee that investigated the January 6, 2021 insurrection from immediately going to the National Archives.
Along with an official 845-page final report, the January 6 Committee has been releasing troves of the data it has collected over its year-and-a-half investigation.
As late as Sunday it posted thousands of pages of evidence to a public database, much of which had never been seen before, further illustrating former President Trump allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election. They included phone records, text messages and emails.
The Government Publishing Office has created an online repository for the Committee. The site currently features the Committee’s final report, a variety of video exhibits and a detailed timeline of how the violence unfolded at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
The nearly minute-by-minute timeline, broken up into seven geographic locations around the Capitol, summarizes how rioters broke into the building, disrupting Congress in its Constitutional duty to certify the 2020 Presidential election.
The vast majority of the Committee’s raw data, which includes more than 1,000 interviews and extensive videos, is slated to be sent to the National Archives, where it could be locked away for up to 50 years.
On Tuesday, after the 118th Congress is sworn in—and after it has voted for a new Speaker of the House—it’s set to vote on a proposed new rules package that requires that any record created by the January 6 Committee, instead of going to the National Archives, be sent to the House Committee on House Administration by January 17. It further orders the National Archives to return any material it has already received.
The move could signal that House Republicans plan to try to rebut the Committee’s investigation, which concluded by making four criminal referrals of former President Trump to the Department of Justice.
In November, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who hopes to secure the House Speakership on Tuesday, sent a letter to Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who Chaired the January 6 Committee, demanding the Committee preserve “all records collected and transcripts of testimony taken during your investigation.”
In a statement Monday,Thompson indicated that the National Archives has already begun receiving records from the Committee.
The January 6 Committee is due to officially disband at 11:59am Eastern Time on Tuesday.
