Rewriting Jan. 6
Terry H. Schwadron
Oct. 16, 2025
If Congress decides to meet again anytime soon — Speaker Mike Johnson has just delayed re-opening another week — the project to rewrite Jan. 6 will be near the top of the list for Republicans.
A new Jan. 6 committee to investigate the previous Jan. 6 is ready to go.
Public attention may vie with the expected arrival of the final vote needed to demand release of Jeffrey Epstein files from the Justice Department and this minor spat over health care access supports that have closed the government altogether. But count on the revisit to Jan. 6 to demand a share of television news time.
Just last week, Donald Trump threw another log on the social media fire by posting the already debunked notion that 274 FBI agents were somehow responsible for inciting his crowd to riot at the Capitol to make it appear that Trump forces were lawbreakers. Indeed, Trump blamed the “Biden FBI” when a mere check of the calendar would show that Trump was still president on Jan. 6 — since the whole point of the election insurrection attempt was to remain in office.
The FBI claim was crazy enough to prompt Trump-appointed FBI Director Kash Patel to undercut it, by stating publicly that of that total, all but three were dispatched after violence had begun to help control the crowd. The other three were FBI informants who never breached the Capitol.
Last week we also saw Republican outrage that phone information from six Republican senators had been subpoenaed as part of the Jan. 6 probes, presumably to show that phone calls from the White House to influence any vote on confirming Electoral College results were continuing until the rioting — and after. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., denounced investigators for “tapping his phone,” which is something they did not do.
But this is Trump-required fantasy to clear any suggestion of wrong-doing ever, both by disputing what is believed to have happened that day, witnessed by all of us in stunning television and in more than 1,600 trials that Trump threw away with a blanket pardon on his first day in office in January.
And so, we now are witnessing the preliminary stages towards dismissals of FBI investigators and Justice prosecutors or the indictment on criminal charges of Special Counsel Jack Smith and others in the Biden administration. If you erase the prosecutors, apparently you erase the event.
Investigate the Investigators
In the House, Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., is set to head a Republican-majority panel to revisit every step of Jan. 6 investigation, including the work of the previous special committee. Loudermilk has pushed House Speaker Mike Johnson for wide jurisdiction in the probe.
Other panel members will include Republican Representatives Morgan Griffith of Virginia, Troy Nehls of Texas and Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, as well as Democratic Representatives Eric Swalwell of California, Jasmine Crockett of Texas and Jared Moskowitz of Florida. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., will serve from the Judiciary Committee.
Loudermilk has been angry for years after being among those depicted as showing visitors around the Capitol on the day before the riot. Nehls sued the government over what he claimed was retaliation from the Capitol Police for his criticism of the force’s handling of the unrest. Hagerman unseated former Rep. Lynn Cheney over her role on the investigative committee, and Jordan attacks the Biden administration every day. Democrats Swalwell and Crockett are outspoken adversaries of Republicans, and Raskin served on the first panel.
Issues range from assigning labels and redeciding “fact” to distributing blame to sources other than Trump. There is even an ongoing debate over whether to hang a plaque commissioned by Congress to honor those who protected the Capitol that day. Speaker Johnson has refused to display the memorial, and Loudermilk, while expressing personal support for the officers, said that decision is “not in my decision-making wheelhouse.”
There are disputes over who did or didn’t call in the National Guard, who did or did not prepare for violence, whether Capitol police invited violence and the role of myriad government officials at different levels during the day and leading up to it.
At the FBI, Patel keeps finding reason to dismiss agents who had been assigned various investigative duties connected with Jan. 6 or with searching Mar-a-Lago and finding hundreds of classified documents with a court order. At the Justice Department, scores of prosecutors connected with Jan. 6 cases are being dismissed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who offers no reason.
That Trump was impeached for a second time, though not convicted, and that he and his team faced multiple investigations stemming from Jan. 6 will not be removed because we have partisan rewriting of history underway. Capitol police were injured and killed, as well as one insurrectionist shot dead that day. The riot was not an outbreak of peace and love gone wrong, as Trump would have us now accept. It was a planned, brutal assault on the Capital, the Congress, and democracy.
##