Several Democrats involved in the highly partisan House January 6 Committee are saying they fear they will be arrested under a future Donald Trump administration.
As reported by CBS News, Trump raised the issue, taking to social media last month to assert that former Rep. Liz Cheney and other members of the House Jan. 6 Select Committee should be imprisoned. Cheney, one of the two Republicans on the committee, was defeated in her reelection bid in Wyoming in 2022.
“She should go to jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” he wrote in response to a report from Just the News.
The committee was disbanded after Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives after the 2022 midterm elections.
Reps. Adam Schiff, Pete Aguilar, and Zoe Lofgren, all representing California, expressed their serious concern regarding Trump’s threats of imprisoning members of the committee.
“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 testified before the committee expressed apprehension about potential reprisals from a second 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 to CBS News, a spokesperson for Trump denounced the Jan. 6 committee as a sham, accusing it of deceiving the American public for years and concealing evidence that allegedly vindicated Trump and his supporters from engaging in an insurrection.
Trump’s comment came in response to a Just the News report indicating that Cheney attended the deposition of a Secret Service agent who provided a firsthand account of Trump’s presence in the limousine leaving the Stop the Steal rally on January 6. Instead of heading to the Capitol as promised to his supporters, the limousine took Trump to the White House.
Former White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson, who was brought before the House Jan. 6 select committee at the behest of Cheney to speak out against Trump, alleged that she overheard Secret Service agents discussing an altercation involving Trump attempting to seize 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, refuting Hutchinson’s account.
In February, meanwhile, the House Administration Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee, responsible for investigating both the 2021 Capitol riot and the prior Democrat-led inquiry into the riot, discovered that during the chamber’s transition to GOP control in January 2023, over 100 files were encrypted and deleted from hard drives, the New York Post reported.
The select committee was expected to provide Republican Chairman Barry Loudermilk of Georgia with four terabytes of archived data. The outlet, however, reported that his committee only received two terabytes of data.
In an X post, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) ripped 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.”
