Report: Jan. 6 Committee Facing Investigation for Allegedly Deleting Over 100 Encrypted Files
A digital forensics team discovered “that 117 files were both deleted and encrypted.” Rep. Barry Loudermilk wants all the passwords.
House Administration Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Barry Loudermilk told Fox News he started an investigation into allegations the January 6 committee deleted encrypted files before the GOP took control of the House:
“It’s obvious that Pelosi’s Select Committee went to great lengths to prevent Americans from seeing certain documents produced in their investigation. 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,” Loudermilk told Fox News Digital.
“The American people deserve to know the full truth, and Speaker Johnson has empowered me to use all tools necessary to recover these documents to get the truth, and I will.”
From Fox News:
The House Administration Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee is leading an investigation into Jan. 6, 2021, led by Chairman Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga. The panel is investigating the security failures on that day, as well as the “actions” of the former select committee investigating the Capitol riot.
Loudermilk, last week, told Fox News Digital his investigation has entered a “new phase” with renewed support from House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who has committed additional resources to the panel’s investigation.
Sources familiar with Loudermilk’s investigation told Fox News Digital that, per House rules, the former select committee, which was chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., was required to turn over all documents from its investigation to the new, GOP-led panel, after Republicans secured the majority of the House of Representatives following the 2022 midterm elections.
Thompson supposedly told Loudermilk that the committee would give him “four terabytes of archived footage.”
The committee only got two terabytes.
A digital forensics team discovered “that 117 files were both deleted and encrypted.” It happened on January 1, 2023, right before Thompson sent the data to the new committee.
The forensics team recovered the 117 files.
Loudermilk wants all the answers and passwords:
Loudermilk added that Thompson also “claimed that you turned over 4-terabytes of digital files, but the hard drives archived by the Select Committee with the Clerk of the House contain less than 3- terabytes of data.”
Loudermilk explained that after a forensic analysis of the data and archived hard drives, he was able to recover “numerous digital records from hard drives archived by the Select Committee.”
“One recovered file disclosed the identity of an individual whose testimony was not archived by the Select Committee,” Loudermilk wrote. “Further, we found that most of the recovered files are password-protected, preventing us from determining what they contain.”
Loudermilk asked that Thompson provide him “a list of passwords for all password-protected files created by the Select Committee” so that his committee can “access these files and ensure they are properly archived.”
Loudermilk fell under suspicion of helping orchestrate the Capitol Hill Riot with a tour he gave on January 5, 2021.
It’s beyond ridiculous this ever happened since so many of them give tours:
The House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, raised the issue publicly in a letter last month asking Loudermilk to explain the purpose of his January 5 meeting with a group of constituents. Days after the attack, some Democrats began accusing Republicans of providing tours to individuals who later went on to storm the Capitol.
“There is no evidence that Representative Loudermilk entered the U.S. Capitol with this group on January 5, 2021,” Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger wrote in a letter on Monday to Rep. Rodney Davis, the top Republican on the House Administration Committee. “We train our officers on being alert for people conducting surveillance or reconnaissance, and we do not consider any of the activities we observed as suspicious.”
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Comments
The Unselect Committee was so interested to see everyone else’s communications. Let’s see theirs.
Here’s a great idea,
https://joehoft.com/time-to-track-every-politician-in-the-us-instead-of-them-tracking-us/
When the Founders/Framers spoke of freedom, they meant freedom FROM government,
“It wasn’t what government did that made America great; it was what government was prevented from doing that made the difference,
“What set America apart from all other lands was freedom – for the individual. Freedom to work, to produce, to succeed and, especially, to keep the fruits of one’s labor.
“America became great precisely because the stifling effects of too much government had been prevented [by means of Constitutional limitations].”
Part of narration of Overview of America,
https://jbs.org/video/featured/overview-of-america/?mc_cid=aab99f82ce
The ideal of “self-government” has been corrupted to mean “we elect people to run our lives for us,” when it’s supposed to mean “each person governs themselves.”
Sounds about par for the course if Liz Cheney was involved.
Use RICO to permanently abolish the democrat party
(So we don’t have to have a war)
The Democratic Party is a criminal enterprise masquerading as a political party.
As long as Democrats exist, whether or not they belong to an organized party, civil war is inevitable. The Democrat/liberal mindset is wholly incompatible with a free country.
All of this was necessary to save their precious de-mock-racy.
This was supposedly a “bipartisan” investigation. So there’s no reason for Republican representatives to be blocked from seeing the files.
republicans are only allowed to see what the democrats want them to see. And despite the declarations of outrage from the likes of Loudermilk they will never be able to see all /i> of the documents. republicans just don’t have the balls to push these kinds of things into an outright confrontation. They’re all talk & no action. By next month republicans will have found yet another thing to be outraged about and this will be forgotten. Just like everything else.
I wish I could say I believe you are mistaken. Yep, sure do wish I could.
You’re probably right. If you look up “impotent” in the dictionary it will likely be illustrated with the Republican Party logo.
You’ll notice that this wasn’t criminal destruction of evidence in a due-process context, it was just a “violation of House rules.” No politician will ever pass actual laws criminalizing the offenses they commit “inside the club.” Not even the constitution defines actual penalties and punishments (other than mere job loss) for “public servants” who violate its guarantees and protections. They even exempted themselves from spamming laws… what chance is there of them leaving themselves open to any charge even remotely serious?
BWAHAHAHAHAHA . . . snicker . . . snort , , ,
Sorry, couldn’t help myself thinking that Loudermilk is going to get the whole truth and nothing but the truth from the democrats. Nothing will come of this and by next month Loudermilk and the rest of the usual republican suspects will be howling in outrage about yet another democrat incident. Lather, rinse, repeat up to the 2024 presidential elections and that will be it. Guaranteed.
No worries. I suspect that the 117 missing files are stored in a safe place with Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails.
Sadly, they were irretrievably ruined when Stacey Adams wet the bed in the Lincoln bedroom during a command appearance for Joe Biden.
This is getting curiouser and curiouser!
Does the IT department not do backups?
Password protecting a file places an access control on the file so that only someone with the password can access the file, usually under operating system control. The underlying file is not altered and can usually be accessed with a few minutes worth of effort. Encryption renders the plaintext file unreadable by replacing it with encrypted text generated through the use of a computer encryption algorithm. The encrpyted text cannot be read without first decrypting it, which requires a password.
The point is that password protecting files and encrypting them are not the same.
It seems to me, too, that deleting, or even attempting to delete the committee records (which are Congressional records) would constitute obstruction of Congress, as would intentionally withholding passwords necessary to access records. Wait. Wait. Aren’t there several hundred people in jail and prison who were criminally charged with the same crime for walking through a building?
It seems ridiculous to believe that the committee was given original documents/files for their use. The fact that forensic exam was able to identify and retrieve those files says 1. They weren’t securely deleted 2. Those same files came from some other system that may still have them in un corrupted form possibly not even password protected (or they were created by the committee) and 3. Not delivering those passwords to the next committee should have severe consequences. But, the scofflaws are democrats and I’m not up to speed on all of their privileges.
Secure deletion became a much more difficult thing to accomplish after the world moved from rotational drives to SSDs, because of “wear leveling.” MacOS used to offer a “secure” option to Empty Trash — now it doesn’t even bother because it would be false advertising.
I’d wager there’s software that allows “secure deletion” by encrypting a file without requiring a password, making the file unrecoverable even by the person doing the delete. Without the key, even if the file still resides on a drive, its contents can’t be read.
But they were wearing red hats! Totally different!
There is no way the Democrats are going to give the Republicans any encryption codes. They will just say they don’t remember. The encryption will have to be cracked, and this means having an automated system trying every possible password, which could take eons. Cyrptographers might be able to do it in less time if they know the algorithm and the codes weren’t complex enough. Most likely, the clock will run out on the GOP House first.
Have they tried ByAnyMeansNecessary?
This is the government we’re talking about. They are, if nothing else, incompetent.
This stuff must be really, really damming!
They would not have destroyed the files if it was not harmful.
I just name them “temp” and keep overwriting it. Of course there’s oldtemp and oldtemp.sv for stuff I need.
I feel so sorry for the Jan 6 political prisoners and their families
Oh crap!! here we go again!
“Investigation” Politician-speak for “you’ll never hear another word about this again……..ever.”
Ever hear the results of the three investigations of Ilhan Omar? Yeah – me neither.
Immigration Fraud
Marriage Fraud
Campaign Finance Fraud.
Leftists never swing from a rope.
Menendez gone yet?
OK, SOTUS just opined that the Feds can cut down Abbott’s wire fence in the Rio Grande, and to no surprise that Snake In The Grass, Barrett sided with the libs,…so did Roberts, but that was also exected
1. I think they were correct to do so.
2. I hope SCOTUS rules that where the feds have exclusive legislative jurisdiction, the States must butt out.
3. This will be used against certain anti-Constitutional elements in the future. So it’s all good.
Jack Poso 🇺🇸
@JackPosobiec
Trump just got the entire media to finally admit Nancy Pelosi was in charge of security on Jan 6
https://x.com/JackPosobiec/status/1748866017252573457?s=20
Destroying evidence inconvenient for their preferred narrative.
SSDs can be wiped easily and quick in a way that is unrecoverable by simply writing 1 or 0 to every entry. (DES standard does that three times with random codes) Whoever did this might have *intentionally* left them in a state where they could be recovered. Just theorizing.
Yes, but that would also have wiped the data they “wanted” the Republicans to have. You have to securely wipe the whole drive, you can’t jus wipe a portion of it.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s not like the government is in charge, and the parties just work there. The congress doesn’t own those records, The Screaming D’s do.
The government is there for the party, the party is there for the people who run it, the agencies and operatives get a piece of the action for going along with the scheme, “the people” are the livestock to be harvested, and harvested from.
I do not understand.
Every other channel, site, or medium digs for all the content they can get. People have been content-grubbing since cable TV gave us more than 3 channels.
Now, it seems the Screaming D’s had all that Jumbotron real estate, and did not at least jukebox through everything they had, 24×7?