House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Thursday that Democrats are prepping to battle any GOP effort to minimize the severity of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Jeffries said he’s in talks with Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, about the party’s best approach to a new select committee, created by Republicans this week, that will revisit the attack in the coming months.
Republicans have sought to downplay both the violence on Jan. 6 and President Trump’s role in fomenting it. Jeffries suggested he expects the new select committee to continue those trends, warning that Democrats won’t allow Trump’s allies to rewrite the history of the tragic event.
“We will aggressively and forcefully push back against any effort to try to whitewash what happened on Jan. 6, where a mob of violent individuals attacked the Capitol as part of an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election at the direction of Donald Trump,” he told reporters in the Capitol.
Approved by House Republicans on Wednesday, the select committee is designed to revisit the events of Jan. 6, when hundreds of Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a failed effort to block Congress from certifying his defeat in the 2020 election. More than 1,500 people were convicted of federal crimes related to the rampage, including assaults on police officers; Trump pardoned virtually all of them on his first day back in office.
The new investigative panel also appears to have the jurisdiction to examine the work of the first Jan. 6 select committee, which was created by Democrats in 2021, under former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and reached the conclusion that Trump had orchestrated the riot.
Republicans have bashed that investigation, characterizing it as a one-sided “witch hunt” designed solely to hurt Trump politically. That was the conclusion of a report issued last year by Republicans on the House Administration Committee’s oversight subpanel, led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.).
That investigation also blamed the attack on leaders of the U.S. Capitol Police, for a failure to provide proper security, and recommended that former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), a Trump critic who helped lead the first Jan. 6 select committee, be prosecuted.
Jeffries is in charge of naming three Democrats to sit on the new, eight-member select committee, although Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) — who will choose the five Republicans — has veto power over the Democratic picks. The panel will be led by Loudermilk, who said it will build off his previous work.
“While my previous investigation did an incredible job last Congress, there is still much work to be done,” he said. “Our goal is to answer the remaining questions, uncover all the facts, and implement reforms so this level of security failure never happens again. It’s time to finish the job.”
Jeffries did not indicate a timeline for choosing his nominees. But Raskin, a former constitutional lawyer who sat on the initial Jan. 6 committee is automatically an “ex officio” member given his position as the ranking member of Judiciary.
In response to the new investigation, Raskin said Democrats will use the platform to highlight Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack.
“[We] welcome yet another chance to remind Americans of House Republicans’ ongoing complicity with — and embarrassing apologetics for — MAGA’s violent insurrection against Congress and Vice-President Mike Pence and Trump’s sinister attempt to overthrow a presidential election which he lost to President Biden by more than 7 million votes,” he said.
Emily Brooks contributed.
