January 6 Committee Deleted Over 100 Encrypted Files After 2022 Midterms

The controversial former House Select Committee on January 6th was revealed to have deleted over 100 encrypted files from its investigation several days before the GOP took back the majority in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections.

According to Fox News, the actions of the J6 Committee are being investigated by the House Administration Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee, which is led by Chairman Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.). The J6 Committee was established by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) with virtually no Republican support; the committee featured just two Republican members, Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), both hand-picked by Pelosi due to their outspoken anti-Trump stances. Both left Congress in January of 2023.

Sources close to Loudermilk’s investigation have said that the J6 Committee was required to hand over all documents and other relevant materials to the new Republican majority. Despite J6 Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) telling Loudermilk that the Oversight Subcommittee would receive four terabytes of data, the final result amounted to just two terabytes.

A digital forensics team hired by Loudermilk’s investigation performed scrapes on the hard drives to determine which information was deleted, and concluded that at least 117 files were deleted and encrypted. The deletion most likely took place on January 1st, 2023. The forensics team was able to recover all deleted files, and Loudermilk is now demanding answers from the Democrats as to why such crucial information was deleted.

“As you acknowledged in your July 7, 2023 letter, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (Select Committee) did not archive all Committee records as required by House Rules,” Loudermilk wrote in a letter to Thompson. “You wrote that you sent specific transcribed interviews and depositions to the White House and Department of Homeland Security but did not archive them with the Clerk of the House.”

Detailing the recovered files, Loudermilk claimed that “one recovered file disclosed the identity of an individual whose testimony was not archived by the Select Committee.”

“Further, we found that most of the recovered files are password-protected, preventing us from determining what they contain,” Loudermilk continued, demanding “a list of passwords for all password-protected files created by the Select Committee” that will allow his committee to “access these files and ensure they are properly archived.”

The J6 Committee was widely viewed as a hyper-partisan entity, run entirely by the Democrats and with the explicit intent of determining guilt over the peaceful protest on January 6th, rather than actually investigating what happened in the lead-up to that day. The committee’s final recommendation of charges against President Donald Trump ultimately led to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of the former president, which has become one of the dominant campaign issues in the 2024 election.