House Republicans announced Wednesday that they will form a subcommittee to reinvestigate the January 6 insurrection, following Donald Trump’s sweeping pardons for the rioters.
The new select subcommittee will basically just be a way to continue to undermine the legitimate findings of the previous investigation into January 6, which Trump and MAGA Republicans have continued to claim are fraudulent.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said he hoped the committee would expose “false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 committee.”
The select subcommittee will be chaired by Representative Barry Loudermilk, who also leads the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, and last month released a 128-page “interim report” by House Republicans on the January 6 committee.
In his report, Loudermilk demonstrated that House Republicans are in lockstep with Trump over investigating the president’s political enemies, and called for Liz Cheney, the former January 6 committee vice chair, to be criminally investigated. Loudermilk accused her of witness tampering and colluding with former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified about Trump’s erratic behavior on the day of the deadly riot.
Just hours before Wednesday’s announcement, Senate Majority Leader John Thune had been downplaying Trump’s decision to pardon some 1,500 January 6 riots, insisting that people should not think about the insurrection anymore.
“We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward,” he said, according to CNN’s Manu Raju. Thune said that the pardons were given on a case-by-case basis, and that former President Joe Biden had “opened the door” because he had engaged in the “most massive use of the pardon power that we’ve ever seen in history.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson did the same. “The president’s made his decision; I don’t second-guess those,” Johnson said. “We move forward, there are better days ahead of us, that’s what we’re excited about. We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forwards.”
But of course, rushing them all through on his first day was anything but case-by-case, and Republicans aren’t the slightest bit interested in looking forward.
As Loudermilk told reporters Wednesday: “You’ve got to look backwards to look forward.”
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