Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan said he would refuse Democrats’ request for cooperation with the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 in a letter to Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., Sunday.
In December, the House panel to which Jordan’s minority appointment was barred by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi demanded the prominent Freedom Caucus member answer questions over his decision to oppose certification of the 2020 election results.
Democrats’ request, Jordan wrote, “amounts to an unprecedented and inappropriate demand to examine the basis for a colleague’s decision on a particular matter pending before the House of Representatives.”
“I have no relevant information that would assist the Select Committee in advancing any legitimate legislative purpose,” Jordan added, who is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee with no authority over Capitol security. “I cannot speak to Speaker Pelosi’s failure to ensure the appropriate security posture at the Capitol complex in advance of well-publicized protests on January 6, 2021.”
Jordan highlighted the Select Committee’s double standards in issuing partisan subpoenas exclusively to Republican lawmakers as opposed to Democrats, who are responsible for adequate security at the Capitol. While the Select Committee was ostensibly established to probe the Capitol security failures, Thompson has explicitly refused an inquiry into Pelosi’s culpability as the partisan probe absent of Republican appointees remains focused on retribution against political dissidents.
“If you look at the charge that we have in the resolution, it says ‘the facts and circumstances around January 6.’ I don’t see the speaker being part and parcel to that,” Thompson told CNN last year.
Pelosi stands credibly accused of unilaterally delaying the National Guard’s preemptive deployment six times preceding the riot that day a year ago, but the speaker also ignored issues raised in a single hearing from the House Oversight Committee held a year and a half in advance.
“It is telling that the Select Committee has chosen only to target Republican Members with demands for testimony about January 6,” Jordan wrote Sunday. “I am aware of no effort by the Select Committee to solicit testimony from Speaker Pelosi, House Administration Chair Zoe Lofgren, or any other Democrat Members with responsibility for or oversight of the security posture at the Capitol complex on January 6.”
Jordan also blasted the committee for its violation of civil liberties in actions such as compelling the release of telecom records belonging to private citizens with no connection to the violence at the Capitol.
“The conduct of the Select Committee to date reinforces the perception that it cannot be trusted to operate fairly or in good faith,” Jordan wrote.
In August, the House Select Committee demanded that 35 telecom and email companies preserve records from as early as April 2020 without notifying individuals their data would be collected by the witch hunt probe.
“If the Select Committee can so readily violate American civil liberties and mislead Americans about the information it possesses–including information relating to me — I have no confidence that the Select Committee will fairly or accurately represent any information I could provide,” Jordan wrote.
Since its inception, the committee, born out of ashes of a failed congressional commission, has focused on punishing political dissidents as opposed to probing the Capitol riot with a legitimate legislative purpose. With no investigation into the security failures that led to several hours of turmoil, the committee has sought to conflate a peaceful White House protest with the violence that erupted at the Capitol before President Donald Trump had finished speaking.
In the process, the committee run by the same bad actors who perpetrated the Democrats’ prior hoaxes have fabricated evidence again, again, again, and again.
Meanwhile, Republicans running their own investigation after Pelosi took the self-proclaimed “unprecedented” step to bar GOP appointments to her Select Committee have been blocked from critical records requests by the speaker’s deputies and federal agencies.
