Some Democrats who are part of the House January 6 Committee, which is known for its strong political bias, have expressed concerns about the possibility of being detained if Donald Trump returns to power in the future.
According to CBS News, Trump brought up this concern by posting on social media last month, claiming that former Representative Liz Cheney and other committee members should face imprisonment. Cheney, who is one of the two Republicans on the committee, lost her reelection campaign in Wyoming in 2022.
“She should go to jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” he wrote.
The committee was dissolved following the Republicans’ victory in the 2022 midterm elections, which allowed them to regain control of the House of Representatives. California Representatives Adam Schiff, Pete Aguilar, and Zoe Lofgren voiced their strong apprehension over President Trump’s statements about potentially incarcerating committee members.
“One of the things that I observed during our Jan. 6 committee work was that when Trump says something, he intends to do it,” Lofgren told CBS News. “I take that lesson to heart.”
Police officers who appeared before the committee conveyed concerns regarding possible retaliation from another term under the Trump administration.
“Anybody who has testified against him or spoken out in a public capacity should be worried,” Harry Dunn, a former U.S. Capitol police officer and Democratic congressional candidate in Maryland, told CBS News. “Trump means what he says.”
In a statement given to CBS News, a representative for Trump criticized the Jan. 6 committee as a fraud, claiming that it had misled the American public for years and hidden evidence that supposedly cleared Trump and his supporters of involvement in an insurrection. Trump’s response was prompted by a report from Just the News revealing that Cheney was present at the deposition of a Secret Service agent who recounted Trump’s presence in the limousine leaving the Stop the Steal rally on January 6. Instead of going to the Capitol as promised, the limousine took Trump to the White House.
Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House staffer summoned by Cheney to testify against Trump before the House Jan. 6 select committee, alleged that she overheard Secret Service agents discussing an incident where Trump tried to take control of the presidential limousine’s steering wheel from the back seat.
“The driver testified that he specifically refuted the version of events as recounted by Hutchinson,” the report released by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., chair of the House Administration subcommittee on Jan. 6, noted. “The driver of the SUV testified that he ‘did not see him reach [redacted]. [President Trump] never grabbed the steering wheel.
“I didn’t see him, you know, lunge to try to get into the front seat at all,’” the agent testified.
During February, the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Administration Committee, which is tasked with investigating the 2021 Capitol riot and the previous Democrat-led inquiry, made a troubling discovery. It was revealed that over 100 files were encrypted and deleted from hard drives during the transition to GOP control in January 2023. This information was reported by the New York Post.
The Republican Chairman Barry Loudermilk from Georgia was supposed to receive four terabytes of archived data from the select committee. However, the committee only provided two terabytes of data, as per the outlet’s report. In a separate statement, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) criticized the committee.
“As I said from day one, Nancy Pelosi’s sham January 6th Committee was illegitimate and unconstitutional. It should come as a surprise to no one that Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney’s fake committee illegally deleted records of their sham investigation and obstructed justice,” Stefanik wrote in a post to X Tuesday. “The American people deserve full transparency.”