The “counter report” from the five House Republicans who were originally nominated to the Select Committee to investigate the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot is so hot that many of its sources were shielded from being named for fear of retaliation and reprisal by their superiors.
The report — Security Failures at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 — was prepared at the direction of the five Republicans who should have been on the Select Committee: Reps. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), and Troy Nehls (R-Texas).
When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to seat Reps. Banks and Jordan, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy withdrew the other three from consideration, knowing that the Select Committee was to be nothing more than a kangaroo court — an inquisition instead of an investigation — designed to attack and sully the reputation of former President Donald Trump.
From the report:
This report goes to great lengths to protect the identities of the line officers and analysts who participated in interviews.
Sources who cooperated with this investigation described retaliation by USCP [U.S. Capitol Police] leadership for their participation in this investigation and other investigations into the events of January 6, 2021.
The report pointed to the likely instigator of those potential reprisals on the whistleblowers the counter report relied on:
The Staff Director for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, David Buckley, has a track record of acting in a retaliatory manner against whistleblowers.
For those reasons, this report uses “USCP source” to cite or otherwise refer to conversations with USCP employees who are not in leadership positions.
The counter report not only damns the Capitol Police for incompetence leading up to and during the January 6 riot, it also puts much of the blame on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It claims that Democrats, who held the majority in the House, were responsible for the security at the Capitol, and they failed — perhaps deliberately.
From the report:
Documents provided by the House Sergeant at Arms show how then-House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving carried out his duties in clear deference to the Speaker [Pelosi], her staff, and other Democratic staff.
Meanwhile, members of the Republican House leadership were kept in the dark about proposed security measures until it was too late to rectify any errors. Said the report:
Leadership and law enforcement failures within the U.S. Capitol left the complex vulnerable on January 6, 2021.
The Democrat-led investigation in the House of Representatives, however, has disregarded those institutional failings that exposed the Capitol to violence that day.
What the report implies is clear: Since Capitol Police were denied knowing the potential for violence, and thus preparing for that possibility, instigators of violence insinuated in the vast crowd of citizens were allowed to run rampant. The media was complicit in reporting endlessly that, because of those relatively few intentional troublemakers, the entire crowd — and thus the former president himself — was responsible.
Based on that assumption, hundreds of otherwise innocent people have been arrested and jailed, and remain incarcerated in what are reported to be wretched conditions, many without being charged with a crime.
The counter report asks: “Why [was] the Capitol left so unprepared?” It provides several reasons, including “internal politics” and “unnecessary bureaucracy,” but fails to suggest that the lack of preparation was deliberate in the hopes that thugs inserted in the crowd would create the chaos desired.
Without calling it a “false flag” event, the report makes it clear that malfeasance of the first order made such infiltration and its consequences inevitable. Concluded the report: “The USCP was set up to fail.”
Among the report’s key findings:
Republicans were “intentionally excluded” from “key meetings and conversations related to House Security”;
USCP “leadership … retaliated against subordinates who spoke out about the division’s shortcomings”;
The House Sergeant at Arms “was compromised by politics … and did not adequately prepare the capitol for possible violence”; and consequently “U.S. Capitol Police did not give officers the appropriate training necessary to prepare them to protect the capitol from violence.”
The final report from the Select Committee is due out next week.
