House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) warned Republicans on Monday that they’ll regret their decision to reexamine the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Jeffries said Democrats will use their participation in a newly launched GOP investigation of the rampage to highlight President Trump’s role in fomenting the violence that day.
“Republicans will regret that they’ve decided to go down this road,” Jeffries told reporters in the Capitol.
Republicans last week voted to create a new Jan. 6 investigative committee, which will revisit the attack almost three years after the initial Jan. 6 select committee delivered its report blaming Trump for inciting the riot. The new panel also has powers to investigate the old one.
Republican leaders have defended Trump’s actions surrounding the attack, bashing the initial investigation as a one-sided witch hunt aimed solely at hurting Trump politically. They’re expected to use the new committee in an effort to exonerate their White House ally, who was impeached for a second time in the immediate wake of the 2021 tragedy.
“Our goal is to answer the remaining questions, uncover all the facts, and implement reforms so this level of security failure never happens again,” Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), who will chair the committee, said after the panel was created.
“It’s time to finish the job.”
Democrats say they’ll use the new investigation to shine a light, not only on Trump’s actions, but also on the violence directed against police officers by his supporters and the crimes committed by some of those MAGA loyalists since Trump pardoned them in January.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, is automatically considered an ex officio member of the new panel. And Jeffries named three other Democrats to the committee on Monday: Reps. Eric Swalwell (Calif.), Jasmine Crockett (Texas) and Jared Moskowitz (Fla.).
“Donald Trump is trying to do with Jan. 6 what many fringe groups have done with Sept. 11, telling us it wasn’t planes that flew into the buildings but holograms, or missiles, or that it was an inside job,” Swallwell said Monday. “And here’s why we didn’t buy the 9/11 crazy talk then, or the Jan. 6 lies now: Because we saw them with our own eyes.”
Raskin, who was a member of the initial Jan. 6 committee, characterized a previous Loudermilk investigation as “an attempted Orwellian rewrite” of the events surrounding the attack. He challenged the Republicans to find any inaccuracies in the first select committee’s probe of the event.
“The fact of the matter is they have not laid a glove on a single fact that was presented in the report of the bipartisan select committee on Jan. 6. All of their bizarre counter-theories about antifa and about the FBI have been completely and thoroughly debunked. They have gotten nowhere, and yet they insist once again on returning to the scene of the crime,” he said.
“That gives us the chance to reeducate new generations of Americans about the dangers of political authoritarianism, and about the dangers of political and religious cults.”
While Jeffries has the power to name his Democratic picks for the new committee, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) retains the power to veto any of those lawmakers as he deems appropriate. That was the case in 2021, when former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) removed two of the initial Republican picks — Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and former Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) — for controversial statements and actions they made surrounding Jan. 6.
It’s unclear if the Speaker is ready to accept the four Democratic appointees. Jeffries said he has informed Johnson of his selections, but suggested there has been no response.
“We let him know our choices for this subcommittee, and there’s zero precedent for anyone from the other party determining who is going to sit on a subcommittee — if, in fact, they want to take that subcommittee seriously,” Jeffries said.
Johnson’s office did not respond Monday to a request for comment.
