Amid partisan acrimony, the first hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol will convene Tuesday.
Article by Fred Lucas from Daily Signal.
The panel investigating the Capitol riot has seven Democrats and two Republicans—all appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
The original plan was that Pelosi would name eight members and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., would name five. However, when Pelosi rejected two Republican appointees in a highly unusual move, McCarthy pulled the others as well.
Law enforcement officials are scheduled to provide testimony on the opening day about what they saw Jan. 6 as pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol.
Set to testify are Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell, officers with the U.S. Capitol Police, as well as Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges, officers with the Metropolitan Police Department.
Over the weekend, Pelosi appointed Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois to join Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming as the only two Republicans on the panel.
Both lawmakers were among 10 House GOP members who voted to impeach outgoing President Donald Trump in January, accusing him of inciting the crowd to insurrection during his speech Jan. 6.
Democrats reportedly will allow Cheney to deliver opening remarks Tuesday, along with committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., as a way of making the committee appear more bipartisan.
Thompson is also chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. Though not known for bucking the party line, Thompson was the only House Democrat to vote against a sweeping federal takeover of elections that would ban most state voter ID laws and expand ballot harvesting, among other things. The legislation is considered the top priority of House Democrats.
Pelosi rejected McCarthy’s appointment of Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Jim Banks of Indiana to the select committee, which likely will undermine any possibility of the public accepting its eventual report as credible, said Fred Fleitz, president of the Washington-based nonprofit Center for Security Policy.
“Select committees are the proper way to investigate issues, not outsourcing to ‘blue-ribbon commissions,’ because the members of Congress can be held accountable,” Fleitz told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
“But the idea that the House speaker would veto minority members sets a precedent that future speakers could follow,” added Fleitz, whose career included national security roles at the White House, the CIA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. “This will not be bipartisan. The committee will not have legitimacy in the eyes of the public.”
The panel will examine a mob’s breach of the Capitol as lawmakers went through the process of certifying the electoral votes that would cement Joe Biden’s victory over Trump for the presidency.
In a letter last week to members of the select committee, Pelosi compared the Jan. 6 riot with the Civil War.
“One year into the devastation of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln sent a message to Congress, imploring members to join as one to save the union,” Pelosi wrote.
“Six months since the Jan. 6 insurrection, we, too, have such a responsibility, as the Congress and country face a time of challenge that is no less daunting for the fate of our democracy,” Pelosi later added in the letter. “We have the duty, to the Constitution and the country, to find the truth of the January 6th insurrection and to ensure that such an assault on our democracy cannot again happen.”
McCarthy countered that Pelosi’s named lawmakers who share her preconceived narrative of what happened that day while Trump was finishing a speech on the Ellipse not far from the Capitol.
“The speaker has structured this select committee to satisfy her political objectives,” McCarthy said in a public statement. “She had months to work with Republicans on a reasonable and fair approach to get answers on the events and security failures surrounding Jan. 6.”
Two other members of the select committee are widely known for their roles in Trump’s two impeachments by Pelosi’s House.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He also led the team of House impeachment managers in the 2020 Senate impeachment trial of Trump. In that case, the Senate acquitted the 45th president on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Another select committee member, Rep. James Raskin, D-Md., led the team of impeachment managers in Trump’s second Senate trial early this year, when the Senate acquitted him on the charge of inciting an insurrection.
The other Democrats on the select committee are Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Pete Aguilar, both of California; Stephanie Murphy of Florida; and Elaine Luria of Virginia.
“Let me be clear, I’m a Republican dedicated to conservative values, but I swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution—and while this is not the position I expected to be in or sought out, when duty calls, I will always answer,” Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans, said in a public statement.
In June, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee issued a joint bipartisan report that found the FBI and Department of Homeland Security didn’t warn of potential threats Jan. 6; that Capitol Police were not prepared to respond to those threats; and that a lack of emergency authority delayed the response of the National Guard.
Beyond a security and intelligence failure, there may be little else for the select committee to probe regarding a protest that got out of control, said Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, a Washington-based conservative legal group.
“To call this a plot that threatened democracy defies credulity. There was no scenario where 800 people could swarm the Capitol and prevent Biden from becoming president,” Levey told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
Levey cited the violent riots across the United States last summer, many of them instigated by the extremist groups Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
“Too many people ask whether the Jan. 6 insurrection or the BLM protests is worse,” Levey said. “It’s not about better or worse. We have a long tradition in this country of political protests becoming violent.”
“When it crosses the line from peaceful to violent, law enforcement has dealt with it. That’s the answer. The answer is not a circus committee to make a point about Trump.”
Conservative Opinions Are Being Stifled by Big Tech
We joined a new conservative network for a reason, but we need help keeping it afloat.
When we built this site earlier this year, the idea was to have a venue where we could tell the truth without fear of being taken down by Amazon, Google, Facebook, or any of the other Big Tech Tyrants who fear reality enough that they want to craft it differently. Facts regarding voter fraud, Covid lockdowns, treatments versus vaccines, climate change hysteria, and critical race theory just to name a few were grounds for permanent deletion and blacklisting across the various “arbiters of truth.”
This site was supposed to be a truth factory. The problem we faced was getting around the censors and still getting the word out. It was challenging, much more so than we ever imagined. So, we’re now working with sites like Conservative Playlist, The Liberty Daily, and Uncanceled News to make the truth happen again. With that said, the network needs financial help.
The slow and steady reopening of America is revealing there was a lot more economic hardship brought about from the Covd-19 lockdowns than most realize. While we continue to hope advertising dollars on the sites go up, it’s simply not enough to do things the right way. We are currently experiencing a gap between revenue and expenses that cannot be overcome by click-ads and MyPillow promos alone (promo code “NOQ” by the way).
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One Sick Day Proves We Need More Voices in Truthful Media
On October 19, I was sick. It crossed my mind that I had finally gotten the ‘rona, but my wife’s cream of chicken soup and a few extra hours of sleep into mid-afternoon had be back up and running after a sleepless night before.
When I finally stumbled over to my computer in the evening, I was met with a deluge of concern from readers. They asked what had happened as only one article had been posted that day. Generally, we post between 10-20 daily between all of the sites, not included curated and aggregated content. Seeing that we’d only posted my super-early morning article before taking the rest of the day off had readers assuming the worst.
We have a wonderful and talented group of writers who volunteer their time for the sites and their readers. Sharing their amazing perspectives has always been a blessing to us because we cannot afford to hire anyone at this time. But having great writers is meaningless if we don’t have great editors, or at least one additional. My wife helps me read and edit stories from time to time, but I’m a one-man show when it comes to getting the stories posted.
Whenever I highlight our desperate need for donations, I note that we do not receive money from Google ads even though most in conservative media are beholden. I often ambiguously note that the money donated will help us grow. Today, I’m highlighting a specific need. We must get an editor to help take some of the load and to expand on our mission of spreading the truth to the world. One sick day proved that.
The great news is that there is no shortage of people who CAN help. I am emailed variations of resumes every week by people who are much smarter than I am. As much as I’d love to hire some of them, we simply cannot. That takes money and as blessed as we’ve been to receive donations and collect ad money (though not from Google or Facebook), we have still fallen short.
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JD Rucker