
Mike Johnson Opens Investigation of Inquisitors
The speaker’s January 6 committee is an attempt to rectify what Nancy Pelosi’s inquisition got so wrong.
Evidently, the dueling presidential pardons of recent days do not mean we’re done talking about January 6, 2021. House Speaker Mike Johnson just announced a new committee to investigate the inquisitors and the rest of the truth about that day, so … here we go again. Still.
Johnson has many good reasons for doing this, which I’ll get into below and which we have detailed already in dozens of articles about January 6.
First, Joe Biden opened the bidding with preemptive pardons of, among others, members of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol — a.k.a. Nancy Pelosi’s Histrionic J6 Insurrection™ Inquisition. Nothing screams “innocence” like a preemptive pardon, right? Right?
Donald Trump responded to that outrage with one of his own — a blanket pardon or commutations for nearly all the roughly 1,500 people charged for that day’s, er, events, including the thugs who assaulted police. To be clear, I fully support his decision to pardon the peaceful people involved that day, including grandmothers and a Babylon Bee actor, as well as Lectern Guy and even the shirtless dude in the buffalo hat.
In my humble opinion, however, it was a huge mistake and a miscarriage of justice to pardon the relative few who attacked cops.
Contrary to the Left’s lies, no police officers died that day, though perhaps four would still be alive if not for the day’s events. Ashli Babbitt would be, too, as would three other protesters who died of natural causes during the mayhem. Still, the protesters who used an electroshock weapon, a flag pole, a hockey stick, pepper or wasp and hornet spray, brass knuckles, or other implements to assault and, in some cases, severely injure police deserve to remain behind bars for the duration of their sentences.
Trump had an opportunity to undo the injustice perpetrated by Biden’s Two-Tiered Justice Department, which absurdly lumped in well over a thousand peaceful people with the actual rioters for the sole purpose of building the Insurrection™ narrative. It doesn’t sound much like an existential “threat to democracy” if it was maybe a couple hundred guys actually fighting cops. Democrats decided it was better to say that “1,500 people were brought to justice.” The whole thing was a Democrat political charade meant to maximize damage against the entire Republican Party, but most of all, Donald Trump.
To rectify that, Trump should have done what the DOJ hacks did not do — distinguish between thugs fighting with police and people peacefully walking the halls of Congress after police let them in. He failed to do that, in fact, reinforcing the narrative of sameness.
“Look, if you protested peacefully on January 6 and you’ve had Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned,” said JD Vance just two weeks ago. “If you committed violence on that day, obviously, you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
Welp, so much for that wisdom.
The message sent to law enforcement nationwide is a lousy one. The Rule of Law and the principle of equal justice were undermined. The pardons of peaceful trespassers were sullied by inclusion with the violent. God forbid it encourages future violence. Trump’s golden opportunity to show a fundamental distinction between himself and his disgraceful predecessor was squandered. It’s a sad stain on an otherwise almost universally successful start to his second term.
So, what does Mike Johnson hope to accomplish with another committee?
In short, to expose the truth.
Before the dust even settled that day, Democrats scrambled to inflict maximum damage on Republicans for the riot, despite having ignored, excused, or defended deadly BLM riots all over the country just a few months prior. The hypocrisy was galling, kicking off years of lies and injustice.
The rushed second impeachment of Trump just a few days before he left office was the beginning. Pelosi’s rigged inquisition was next. She did not allow Republicans to choose their own members — House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jim Jordan and Republican Study Committee Chair Jim Banks — to achieve the necessary bipartisan balance and credibility. Integrity wasn’t her objective. Instead, to reach the predetermined verdict of Trump’s “guilt,” she picked the committee’s GOP members herself: Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, neither of whom remain in Congress.
That committee put its thumb on the scale of evidence, refusing to consider some and reportedly in other cases destroying it. Cheney allegedly tampered with a “star witness,” Cassidy Hutchinson, to help produce the desired testimony. The defense was not fairly represented.
Biden pardoned Cheney, by the way, though that leaves her without Fifth Amendment protection. He did not pardon Hutchinson.
That is but a cursory review of the problems with Pelosi’s inquisition. All of it could have been avoided had the Democrats merely adhered to historical and constitutional congressional norms and allowed the GOP to be properly represented on the committee.
As for Johnson’s committee, there are myriad questions we’d still like to see answered. I’ll list just three:
What role did those 26 FBI informants play? I don’t believe the FBI started the riot, and I have cautioned conservatives not to reach too far and blame the bureau for the entire thing. But the FBI has not been forthcoming about its role and presence that day, and Johnson’s committee — along with Kash Patel if he’s confirmed to lead the FBI — may find some intriguing answers.
Why did the FBI never locate the individual who placed pipe bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters? Despite a stellar record of tracking down every dangerous grandma who set foot inside the Capitol, and even though the bureau released video footage of the suspect sitting on a bench in front of the DNC headquarters while using his cellphone, the FBI mysteriously couldn’t find that guy.
Worse, we learned from Georgia Republican Congressman Barry Loudermilk, who chairs the Committee on House Administration’s Oversight Subcommittee and will chair Johnson’s select committee, that cellular carriers “have told Congress they possess intact phone usage data from the vicinity where two pipe bombs were planted” just prior to the January 6 Capitol riot, and this revelation is “directly disputing FBI testimony that agents couldn’t identify a suspect because the phone data was corrupted.”
Let’s just say Patel may have more to clean up than we know.
- Why a wrist-slap for Ray Epps? He’s on video encouraging rioters to “go in to the Capitol,” yet while they got years in prison, he got … [checks notes] … 12 months probation, a laughable $500 in restitution, and 100 hours of community service.
There are other questions we want answered, and still other questions we may not even be aware of yet.
Still, there’s immense political peril for Republicans here. The base is invested in uncovering the truth, but average Americans are more concerned with finally ending inflation and the border crisis than they are with relitigating four-year-old political battles.
Pelosi’s commission destroyed its own credibility by doggedly pursuing nakedly political objectives. The Leftmedia will say the same about Johnson’s committee no matter what it does. The New York Times, for example, is already at it today.
“We are establishing this Select Subcommittee to continue our efforts to uncover the full truth that is owed to the American people,” Johnson said.
Indeed, the committee must take extreme care to communicate clearly via other platforms besides CNN and NBC. It also must produce facts, not politics. If those facts make Trump, Republicans, or some of the MAGA folks at the Capitol on January 6 look bad, then so be it. We already know the facts will reveal the Democrats’ corruption, but for that to sound like more than partisan hackery, the committee must disclose the whole truth and nothing but the truth.