Republicans name members to new Jan. 6 committee

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-LA, on Thursday officially appointed five Republican members to serve on a new GOP-led House select subcommittee reinvestigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Johnson appointed Rep. Barry Loudermilk, GA, to lead the committee. Reps. Morgan Griffith, VA, Clay Higgins LA, Troy E. Nehls, TX, and Harriet Hageman, WY, will also serve on the eight-member committee. The five Republicans will join three Democrats who were named to the committee earlier this week: Reps. Eric Swalwell, Calif., Jared Moskowitz, FL, and Jasmine Crockett, TX. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-MD, will serve in an advisory role.

Loudermilk previously chaired a reinvestigation of the Jan. 6 attack, which saw a pro-Trump mob storm the Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election, while serving on the House Administration Committee during the previous Congress.

The lawmaker said he expects the new subcommittee will revisit questions examined during that inquiry about security failures, and he voiced interest in further investigating the pipe bombs that were placed near the Republican and Democratic national committees the night before the attack on the Capitol.

“We’re just going to continue the work that we did last time, which is looking at the evidence to still try to understand: How did the Capitol get breached?” Loudermilk said in an interview last week, after the subcommittee was approved.

The subcommittee, which will be under the House Judiciary Committee, will have subpoena power and is “authorized and directed to conduct a full and complete investigation” of the events on Jan. 6.

It is intended to be a response to the 117th Congress’s original Jan. 6 select committee, which held high-profile public hearings and released an 845-page report after 18 months of work, including reviewing emails, text messages, call logs and White House records, and conducting more than 1,000 interviews.

Republicans have complained that the original bipartisan committee formed in 2021 was biased against President Donald Trump, who repeatedly denied the results of the 2020 election. Two former Republicans, Liz Cheney, then a congresswoman representing Wyoming, and Adam Kinzinger, who at the time was a congressman representing Illinois, served on the committee. (Cheney invoked Jan. 6 as she broke with the Republican Party and endorsed Kamala Harris for president last year.)

Loudermilk would not say whether he would compel members who served on the previous committee to testify before the new one.

“I don’t know. The speaker told me, ‘Follow the evidence where it leads.’ If we need to ask questions over there, we may, but most of the information that we’re after is going to come from mostly executive-branch agencies at this point,” Loudermilk said.

At least one Democrat from the 2021 committee isn’t concerned about speaking before the panel.

“No, I stand by the work of the committee,” said Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-MS, the chairman of the original Jan. 6 committee. Thompson has repeatedly rejected the idea that the first committee’s work contained errors, or that there are hidden truths about the attack on the Capitol.

The Democratic-led committee’s work spawned many investigative leads, including inside Trump’s West Wing. And it prompted the Justice Department to seriously pursue an investigation into the origins of the attack, which helped lead to Trump’s eventual indictment on a range of charges, including conspiring to defraud the United States.

The original committee’s final report found that Trump actively inspired his supporters to commit violence in his name as he attempted to remain in office despite losing the 2020 election. It also suggested that lawmakers consider banning Trump from running for office again.

Trump ran again in 2024, and won. Upon taking office, he granted nearly a blanket pardon to virtually all Jan. 6 Capitol riot defendants and commuted the sentences of the remaining 14. Among those pardoned was Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys, who had received the stiffest sentence of all the Jan. 6 rioters: 22 years for seditious conspiracy.