We knew all along that the Democrats’ “Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol” was a rigged deal. We just didn’t know how rigged.

Only now, by virtue of the Republicans’ narrow House victory in last November’s midterms, are we getting some much-needed oversight into the Democrats’ efforts to write a one-sided history of the events of that day.

As soon as it became clear that the GOP would retake the House, then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy sent a letter to the J6 committee, reminding its members that they were required to preserve all records related to their work. But now, nine months later, we’re learning that these Trump-deranged Democrats failed to comply with those House rules.

Last week, Georgia Republican Congressman Barry Loudermilk announced that Nancy Pelosi’s committee failed to preserve and turn over key documents, data, video depositions, and other materials related to the committee’s work. As Loudermilk told Fox News:

Part of our task as this oversight subcommittee is to actually address the security failures, look into how did it happen … how were these folks able to get into the Capitol. Nothing was indexed. There was no table of contents index. Usually when you conduct this level of investigation, you use a database system and everything is digitized, indexed. We got nothing like that. We just got raw data. So it took us a long time going through it and one thing I started realizing is we don’t have anything much at all from the Blue Team.

What, you ask, is the Blue Team? Loudermilk says that’s the group within the J6 Committee that was charged with investigating the well-known security failures at the Capitol. According to Fox News, Loudermilk’s sources “have told him the Blue Team was essentially ‘shut down’ by the committee in order to focus on placing the blame on former President Trump.”

Imagine that.

Regarding those security failures, former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund sat for an hour-long interview with Tucker Carlson that aired Thursday on X, formerly known as Twitter. Interestingly, this was a do-over of an interview with Sund that was scheduled to air on Carlson’s Fox News show on April 24 — the very day Carlson was disgracefully fired by the network.

Among the key takeaways from the interview are that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI hid intelligence from the Capitol Police, leaving them with virtually no sense of what was coming that day. “I’ve done many national security events and this was handled differently,” said Sund. “No intelligence, … no coordination, no discussion in advance.” Why might that have been? What possible motive might the FBI have had for failing to share such intel with the people most responsible for securing the Capitol? Might it be because such a show of force might’ve ended the riot before it began?

Sund also confirmed to Carlson that he was twice refused the preemptive National Guard presence that he’d requested in the days prior to January 6. “I was denied twice,” said Sund, “because of optics and because the intelligence didn’t support us. I was denied by Paul Irving, House sergeant-at-arms, and also Mike Stenger, Senate sergeant-at-arms.” Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell: looking at you.

Is it any wonder that lawmakers didn’t want Sund to testify at the J6 hearings?

But back to what Loudermilk’s committee now has, and doesn’t have: “We’ve got lots of depositions, we’ve got lots of subpoenas, we’ve got video and other documents provided through subpoenas by individuals,” he said. “But we’re not seeing anything from the Blue Team as far as reports on the investigation they did looking into the actual breach itself.”

In a June 26 letter, Loudermilk reminded Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, who served as the figurehead chair of the J6 Committee, that he was required by law and House rules “to preserve and turn over all data related to their investigation at the end of the congressional term in December.”

Apparently, to no avail. Thompson responded with a letter of his own saying that Loudermilk’s letter had many “factual errors” and that his committee had turned over four terabytes of data.

But who cares how much data is turned over if it isn’t all the data?

Loudermilk noted that his committee has only received 2.5 terabytes of digitized material, and he pointed to a lengthy, legalese footnote in Thompson’s letter essentially confessing that his committee chose not to preserve and turn over all of its materials. The written transcripts of video interviews, for example, were deemed sufficient by Thompson and his fellow Democrats. And if the Democrats didn’t use the materials in their report, they apparently didn’t think it necessary to save them. How convenient.

“He’s saying they decided they didn’t have to,” said Loudermilk. “The more we go in the more we’re realizing that there’s things that we don’t have. We don’t have anything about security failures at the Capitol, we don’t have the videos of the depositions.”

Loudermilk, it should be noted, was one of the victims of a Democrat smear campaign last year, when the J6 Committee released video of the congressman giving a Capitol tour to his constituents in the days before January 6. Committee Democrats despicably suggested he was giving rioters an advanced look around the premises. And the mainstream media ate it up. “This false narrative that the Committee and Democrats continue to push, that Republicans, including myself, led reconnaissance tours is verifiably false,” Loudermilk said in a statement soon thereafter.

By now, the American people should know that the Democrats’ J6 “investigation” isn’t to be taken seriously. Why not? Because we now know that it was always a rigged game meant to target Donald Trump. Nancy Pelosi made sure of that. Her committee didn’t have a single real Republican on it, as she took the unprecedented step of booting then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s two GOP representatives off the committee. Those men, then-House Judiciary Ranking Member Jim Jordan and Republican Study Committee Chair Jim Banks, would’ve brought serious scrutiny and balance to the committee’s proceedings and findings. And they would’ve asked tough questions. Instead, Pelosi put in their place two Republican turncoats: Liz Cheney, whose Wyoming constituents ultimately voted her out of Congress in record numbers, and Adam Kinzinger, who quit his seat and thereby denied his Illinois constituents the opportunity to do the same.

In retrospect, the J6 Committee wasn’t just a missed opportunity for truth; it was an active effort to bury the truth. And the Democrats’ apparent destruction of J6 materials makes this abundantly clear.

The question now is: What are the Republicans going to do about it?