According to a CBS News report, a number of Democrats who are part of the House January 6 Committee express concerns about potential arrest if a future Donald Trump administration comes into power. Trump himself brought up this matter, using social media to claim that former Representative Liz Cheney and other committee members should be jailed. It is worth noting that Cheney, one of the two Republicans on the committee, lost her reelection campaign in Wyoming in 2022.
“She should go to jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” he wrote in response.
The committee was dissolved following the Republicans’ victory in the 2022 midterm elections, which allowed them to regain control of the House of Representatives. Reps. Adam Schiff, Pete Aguilar, and Zoe Lofgren, who all hail from California, voiced their grave apprehension over Trump’s statements about potentially incarcerating committee members.
“One of the things that I observed during our Jan. 6 committee work was that when Trump says something, he intends to do it,” Lofgren told CBS News. “I take that lesson to heart.”
Police officers who appeared before the committee conveyed their concerns regarding possible retaliation from a subsequent Trump administration.
“Anybody who has testified against him or spoken out in a public capacity should be worried,” Harry Dunn, a former U.S. Capitol police officer and Democratic congressional candidate in Maryland, told CBS News. “Trump means what he says.”
In a statement given to CBS News, a representative for Trump criticized the Jan. 6 committee as a fraud, claiming that it had misled the American public for years and hidden evidence that supposedly cleared Trump and his followers of involvement in an insurrection. Trump’s response was prompted by a report from Just the News revealing that Cheney was present at the deposition of a Secret Service agent who recounted Trump’s presence in the limousine leaving the Stop the Steal rally on January 6. Instead of going to the Capitol as promised, the limousine took Trump to the White House.
Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House staff member who was summoned by Cheney to testify against Trump before the House Jan. 6 select committee, alleged that she overheard Secret Service agents discussing an incident in which Trump tried to take control of the presidential limousine’s steering wheel from the back seat.
“The driver testified that he specifically refuted the version of events as recounted by Hutchinson,” the report released by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., chair of the House Administration subcommittee on Jan. 6, noted. “The driver of the SUV testified that he ‘did not see him reach [redacted]. [President Trump] never grabbed the steering wheel.
“I didn’t see him, you know, lunge to try to get into the front seat at all,’” the agent testified, refuting Hutchinson’s account.
In February, the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Administration Committee, which is tasked with investigating the 2021 Capitol riot and the previous Democrat-led inquiry, uncovered that more than 100 files were encrypted and deleted from hard drives during the transition to GOP control in January 2023, as per the New York Post.
It was anticipated that the select committee would furnish Republican Chairman Barry Loudermilk of Georgia with four terabytes of archived data. Nevertheless, the committee only provided two terabytes of data, according to the outlet. In a separate post, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) criticized the committee.
“As I said from day one, Nancy Pelosi’s sham January 6th Committee was illegitimate and unconstitutional. It should come as a surprise to no one that Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney’s fake committee illegally deleted records of their sham investigation and obstructed justice,” Stefanik wrote in a post to X Tuesday. “The American people deserve full transparency.”