Videotapes of interviews with witnesses that were conducted by the Democrat-led Select Committee investigating Jan. 6 are missing, according to the Republican chairman of the House committee scrutinizing the J6 panel's widely-publicized production as well as security failures related to the protest at the U.S. Capitol.
“All of the videotapes of all depositions are gone,” Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, chairman of the House Administration oversight subcommittee, told the "Just the News, No Noise" television show on Thursday.
Under House rules, the videotapes should have been preserved by the now-defunct J6 committee and its chairman, Mississippi Democrat Rep. Bennie Thompson, Loudermilk said.
Loudermilk said he sent a letter to Thompson asking for the videotapes and Thompson confirmed that Democrats did not preserve them.
“But according to House rules, you have to preserve any data and information and documents that are used in an official proceeding, which they did, They (J6 Democrats) actually aired portions of these tapes on their televised hearings, which means they had to keep those. But yet he chose not to, I believe they exist somewhere. We've just got to find where all these videos are,” Loudermilk said.
Loudermilk also told Just the News that the Democrat-led House committee sent certain evidence such as transcripts to the Biden White House and Homeland Security Department and now the transcripts have been returned to Loudermilk’s GOP-led subcommittee nearly fully redacted so their contents can’t be read.
House Republicans have no records of who the witnesses were, what they said, or why it is being used by the federal prosecutor in their case against Trump, Loudermilk said.
The documents “belong to the House. They should have never been sent. And second of all, do not send them back to me this heavily redacted. Those are our documents,” Loudermilk said.
“But my question is, why was it okay for a Democrat-run House of Representatives to have unredacted documents but not when there's a Republican committee that's looking into this. What is it that the committee and or the White House is trying to hide?”
Meanwhile, Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, the Democrats' star witness at the J6 congressional hearings, submitted significant changes to statements and information she had provided in transcribed interviews with the U.S. House of Representatives dating to February 2022, according to an errata sheet reviewed by Just the News that was kept from the American public.
In the 15-page-long errata sheet, uncovered recently by Loudermilk, Hutchinson signs off on what amount to major changes in her account of key events on J6, including what Secret Service vehicle transported Trump to the rally, whether guns were at the Washington D.C. rally that preceded the protest, and what she knew about a meeting where "Hang Mike Pence" chants were allegedly made.
Just the News noted: "Legal experts said errata sheets for congressional witnesses are common but usually are limited to technical or typographical errors. The experts who reviewed Hutchinson's errata sheet dated Sept. 12, 2022 said it appears to make material changes to her stories."
Robert Charles, former staff director for the House Oversight national security subcommittee during its 1990s-era investigations into the Clinton White House and the Whitewater scandal, said Hutchison's errata were unlike any he had ever seen in his career as a lawyer and could become an issue in future criminal trials in Georgia and Washington D.C., where defendants like Donald Trump and others face Jan. 6-related charges.
"It throws into serious question the credibility of both the witness and the committee and the information she has related to the committee," Charles said. "And it looks like an attempt to manipulate the written record in a way that wasn't supported by the original testimony."
“These aren’t 'corrections.' They constitute entirely new testimony that should be subjected to cross examination,” Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz told Just the News after reviewing the errata sheet.
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