‘Jan. 6’ staffers rip Liz
‘Used’ panel for own gain
Several current and former staffers on the House Jan. 6 committee are angered with Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) influence over the panel’s final report and accuse her of treating the committee as the vehicle for her political future.
Fifteen people who have worked or are working for the panel spoke to The Washington Post and described Cheney, the vice chair of the committee and one of only two Republicans on the panel, as pushing to focus the upcoming report primarily on former President Donald Trump.
According to The Washington Post, findings unrelated to Trump, such as ones on the failures of law enforcement and the intelligence community to stop the Jan. 6 riot from happening; information on the financing for the Jan. 6 attack; and on militia groups and extremism, will be excluded from the final report entirely or relegated to the report’s appendix.
“We all came from prestigious jobs, dropping what we were doing because we were told this would be an important fact-finding investigation that would inform the public,” one former committee staffer told The Washington
Post. “But when [the committee] became a ‘Cheney 2024’ campaign, many of us became discouraged.”
Cheney Communications Director and Deputy Chief of Staff Jeremy Adler blamed “subpar” work of some staff members on the committee for why certain findings will not be included.
He also forcefully acknowledged that Cheney is focusing on Trump in the final report so that an event like Jan. 6 “never happens again.”
Tim Mulvey, a spokesman for the House Jan. 6 committee, told The Washington Post that “a handful of disgruntled staff who are uninformed about many parts of the committee’s ongoing work” won’t have an effect on the outcome of the probe.
Staffers argue that the panel’s original mission statement when it was authorized by Congress was to discover what political forces and intelligence and security failures allowed law enforcement to be unprepared and become overwhelmed by the rioters and ensure that it doesn’t happen again.
They say that by leaving out information relevant to this mission statement, the final report will lack important lessons for the future.
The New York Post has reached out to Cheney’s office for comment.