No, Donald Trump, the January 6 Committee did not destroy evidence
No, Donald Trump, the January 6 Committee did not destroy evidence
It's a nesting doll of mendacity.
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“The January 6th Unselect Committee got rid of EVERYTHING! Discarded, Deleted, Thrown Out. A Flagrant Violation of the law,” Donald Trump screamed into the ether on Truth Social in August, just days after being indicted in DC for obstructing the congressional certification of President Biden’s electoral college win on January 6, 2021.
“They had so much to hide, and now that I have Subpoena Power, they didn’t want to get caught,” he went on. “They knew EXACTLY what they were doing. AN EGREGIOUS CRIMINAL ACT & BLATANT DISREGARD OF THE LAW!”
This fact-free assertion presaged his plan to defend himself in court and out by boosting nonsensical conspiracy theories rather than addressing the actual charges. And he’s continued that in 2024, with a New Year’s post accusing former Rep. Liz Cheney of sabotaging his legal defense by destroying evidence.
Trump has hammered this talking point in recent months.
“The highly partisan January 6th Committee of political Hacks and Thugs has been found to have DELETED & DESTROYED all evidence and findings of the recently ended Committee of TRUMP persecution and hatred,” he asserted on Truth Social in September, without bothering to mention who has been doing the finding. But on that occasion he introduced a new detail.
“This is a highly illegal act to, among other things, protect Crazy Nancy Pelosi for her grossly incompetent, or intentional, actions regarding her weak and inadequate response to security measures taken at the Capitol, for which she was responsible. This evidence is now criminally destroyed!”
Trump’s claim that he offered 10,000 National Guard troops, only to be rebuffed by then-Speaker Pelosi, has been roundly debunked. But, as with so much of what Trump says, the claim about missing evidence is truth-adjacent. It’s substantially false, but is in some tiny measure derived from a true thing. And because swallowing a simplistic lie takes longer than understanding the complicated truth, Trump’s followers largely accept what he says.
The Secret Service
Clearly, the January 6 Select Committee didn’t “destroy” all the evidence it collected. The Committee’s final report runs to 845 pages, and tens of thousands of pages of witness transcripts and committee notes are available online. But those transcripts do not include interviews with Secret Service agents, and if there is a kernel of truth to Trump’s ranting, it’s here. Committee Chair Bennie Thompson and Vice Chair Liz Cheney do indeed appear to have deliberately removed the Secret Service interviews from congressional control before the Committee was dissolved. But they had a good reason to do so.
On December 30, 2022, they sent letters to White House lawyer Richard Sauber and Department of Homeland Security General Counsel Jonathan Meyer entrusting those transcripts to the executive branch. Thompson and Cheney conceded that Secret Service agents had spoken to the Committee only on the explicit understanding that their interviews would be kept confidential to protect “Secret Service operational details or private information regarding any agent.”
Having won back the House in November, Republicans were vowing to investigate the “real” origins of the January 6 attack. In fact, one of the first things former Speaker Kevin McCarthy did when he got his hands on the gavel was to turn over security camera footage from the House on January 6 to Tucker Carlson so the former Fox host could pretend the Qanon Shaman was just a harmless tourist. Fearing that the incoming GOP would target individual Secret Service agents for retribution, Cheney and Thompson sent records of their interaction with the Committee to DHS “for appropriate review, timely return, and designation of instructions for proper handling by the Archives.”
On June 26, 2023, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), chairman of a House Administration Committee subcommittee dedicated to “investigating the investigators,” sent Rep. Thompson a letter demanding to know about the Secret Service materials. Loudermilk, who was furious at having gotten caught giving tours of the Capitol building on January 5, 2021, to people who would riot there the next day, was leading the GOP charge to prove that the insurrection was either no big deal, the fault of the Capitol Police, or provoked by Antifa and FBI provocateurs.
On July 7, Thompson responded that “The Executive Branch was still conducting its review of that material to provide appropriate archiving guidance at the time the Select Committee dissolved,” and thus the outgoing Committee members had not had “the opportunity to properly archive that material with the rest of its records with the benefit of the Executive Branch’s guidance to ensure witness safety, our national security, and law enforcement sensitive information.”
This may have been a bit of a fudge, and it was obviously a big middle finger to Loudermilk and his goons. But it certainly didn’t amount to the destruction of any records, much less all of them as Trump suggests.
The transcripts
There was similar jostling between Loudermilk and Thompson with respect to videotapes of witness testimony. Thompson claimed that he had complied with House preservation rules by archiving the transcripts of the testimony, but not the footage.
“Based on guidance from House authorities, the Select Committee determined that the written transcripts provided by nonpartisan, professional official reporters, which the witnesses and Select Committee staff had the opportunity to review for errata, were the official, permanent records of transcribed interviews and depositions for the purposes of rule VII [of the Rules of the House of Representatives],” he wrote.
Loudermilk raced to Fox to accuse dastardly Democrats — And Liz Cheney! And Adam Kinzinger! — of hiding the evidence.
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"We've got enough to know that there was a huge intelligence failure," he told Laura Ingraham in August, "I think Chairman Thompson's response to me is indicting of him. It's almost like saying, okay, yeah, we decided not to give you stuff. And I'm reading it as, Oh, you decided not to give us the things that you didn't want us to see. I mean, that's kind of the way you have to look at this."
And that appears to have been the genesis of Trump’s nonsensical claims that the Committee destroyed all the evidence which would have proved his innocence.
Trump courtroom shenanigans
A year on, Loudermilk’s promises to pin the blame for January 6 on Nancy Pelosi have come to nothing. He’s been even less effective than Oversight Chair James Comer in his relentless quest to find a reason to impeach President Biden. Although, to his credit, Loudermilk does manage to at least fail quietly.
But what happens on Fox doesn’t stay on Fox, and before long Trump’s lawyers had seized on the supposed destruction of evidence in their quest to undermine the election interference case.
In October, they moved to subpoena Loudermilk, Thompson, Sauber, Meyer, the National Archives, the Clerk of the House of Representatives, and the Committee on House Administration, as the successor entity to the January 6 Select Committee, about the supposedly “missing” evidence which would exonerate their client. Mumbling vaguely about “significant overlap between the Select Committee’s investigation and this case,” Trump’s team demanded “The Select Committee Missing Materials” and all congressional communications with respect to them, both internally and with the executive branch.
In a follow-up brief in November, they alluded to the theory that the “missing” materials related to Trump’s false claim that Speaker Pelosi turned down his offer of 10,000 National Guard members to prevent violence on January 6.
“President Trump is entitled to all evidence regarding widely reported decisions made by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser to not deploy the National Guard, which was authorized and made available by President Trump, on January 6, even if the Committee wrongfully disposed of those materials before disbanding,” they wrote.
Needless to say, Trump’s lawyers provided no citation for this “widely reported” claim, nor did they state any reason to believe that the proof of Pelosi’s supposed perfidy could be found in the subpoenaed documents.
But the special counsel and his team of highly competent lawyers simply rolled their eyes and noted that Trump’s legal team had already gotten the Secret Service documents back in August.
In the cover letter accompanying that production, the Government informed the defendant that the production included materials from the Select Committee, “including, inter alia, … transcripts of interviews and depositions and accompanying exhibits provided by the House Select Committee” and that “[t]his production also includes transcripts of testimony provided by the House Select Committee and related exhibits that the Government obtained from the United States Secret Service and the White House.” A detailed Source Log appended to the cover letter identified each of the witnesses for whom transcripts had been produced, sorted in alphabetical order by last name, along with the Bates range identifying the location of each witness’s transcript in the production.
And since Trump already had the “missing” Secret Service stuff and the witness transcripts, all that was left for Judge Tanya Chutkan to adjudicate was whether Trump was entitled to the videotapes as well.
A witness subpoena requires something more than the mere possibility that dragging in a third party might yield useful evidence. But the best Trump’s lawyers could come up with was a vague suggestion that the videos might be useful to impeach witnesses at trial. They couldn’t even be bothered to say something along the lines of “we need to see the footage of Bill Barr, because he’s a sarcastic old codger, and maybe his self-satisfied chortling doesn’t come through in the transcript.” And so the court denied Trump’s motion.
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“The Motion suggests that the recordings could be used for the ‘[i]mpeachment of witnesses,’” the court wrote. “But Defendant provides no basis for concluding that the video recordings contain any such impeachment evidence.”
In short, Trump lied about the destruction of evidence. He lied about not having the Secret Service information. He lied about Pelosi refusing his offer of 10,000 National Guard troops. And he lied about the evidence of this offer being in the “deleted” materials. The only true thing was that Reps. Thompson and Cheney kept their word to the Secret Service about protecting the identity of agents who testified.
Keep lying … but this time louder
On January 1, Trump rang in the new year by repeating these lies. While normal people were eating black-eyed peas, he was accusing “American Disaster Liz Cheney” of an “ACT OF EXTREME SABOTAGE” that he claimed “MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR MY LAWYERS TO PROPERLY PREPARE FOR, AND PRESENT, A PROPER DEFENSE OF THEIR CLIENT, ME.” And he went on to repeat the nested lies that “Crazy Nancy Pelosi” had rejected the “10,000 soldiers that I offered to to guard the Capitol Building,” and that the evidence of this was in the supposedly deleted evidence.
“Seems like someone is starting 2024 hangry,” Cheney tweeted in response. “You and your lawyers have had the J6 cmttee materials (linked below) plus the grand jury info & much more for months. Lying about the evidence in all caps won't change the facts. A public trial will show it all.”
Fingers crossed that she’s right.
That’s it for this week
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As every accusation is usually a confession, I wonder what evidence Trump has destroyed.
We can only hope that this Winter of Discontent will be made glorious through the laser like penmanship of you and journalists like you.