The former House Select Committee on January 6 deleted 117 encrypted files days before Republicans took control of Congress, a forensic investigation by the Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight found.
The Subcommittee on Oversight, led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga), is currently tasked with investigating January 6 and was supposed to receive over four terabytes of data from the now-defunct Democract-led January 6 committee, helmed by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss). However, Loudermilk’s committee received hard drives containing less than three terabytes of data. This led the Subcommittee on Oversight to hire a digital forensics team to investigate what information was withheld. The team discovered that 117 files were encrypted and deleted on January 1, 2023, only days before Thompson’s committee was supposed to hand the files over to Loudermilk.
Although the missing files have been recovered, the majority are password-protected and cannot currently be accessed, Loudermilk explained in a letter to Thompson demanding that the passwords be handed over. Loudermilk has also sent letters to the White House and Department of Homeland Security requesting “unedited and unredacted transcripts” of testimony given to the January 6 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 rules,” Loudermilk said in a statement given to Fox News Digital. “The American people deserve to know the full truth, and Speaker Johnson has empowered me to use all tools necessary to recover these documents to get the truth, and I will.”
