Forensic investigators hired by a Republican-led committee recovered more than 100 encrypted files that the Democratic-led House Jan. 6 Select Committee deleted days before the GOP took over the House majority, according to a new report released Monday.
House Administration Oversight Subcommittee Chair Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., sent a letter to former Select Committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., demanding he provide answers and passwords for the data, which was deleted against House rules, according to Fox News Digital.
The Oversight Subcommittee, which is investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the former select committee, should have received four terabytes of archived data from the select committee after Republicans entered the majority in January 2023, but it obtained less than three terabytes of data.
The subcommittee hired a digital forensics team to determine what information was not handed over, and the team discovered 117 files that were encrypted and deleted on Jan. 1, 2023, two days before Republicans were sworn into the majority, according to the report.
Loudermilk said in his letter to Thompson that the Mississippi Democrat acknowledged over the summer that the select committee "did not archive all Committee records as required by House Rules" and had "sent specific transcribed interviews and depositions to the White House and Department of Homeland Security but did not archive them with the Clerk of the House."
One recovered file detailed an individual whose testimony was not archived, but "most of the recovered files are password-protected, preventing us from determining what they contain," Loudermilk also said.
The Georgia Republican is demanding Thompson provide a "list of passwords" for all select committee files. He also wrote letters to the White House and Homeland Security Department asking for "unedited and unredacted transcripts" of testimony from their officials before the former select committee.
"It’s obvious that Pelosi’s Select Committee went to great lengths to prevent Americans from seeing certain documents produced in their investigation," Loudermilk told the news network. "It also appears that Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney intended to obstruct our Subcommittee by failing to preserve critical information and videos as required by House rules."
This is not the first report of missing data from the Jan. 6 select committee. Loudermilk told the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show last year that all videotapes from select committee depositions are missing.
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