Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) raised trust issues with the House committee investigating the Capitol riot after it held its first prime-time hearing last week.
During an interview on Sunday, the congressman insisted the Thursday hearing showed nothing new and cast the Jan. 6 committee itself as a “one-sided” endeavor that has demonstrated it cannot be outright trusted. He reminded viewers that last year, the panel admitted to altering a text message between Jordan and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
“This committee has altered evidence and lied to the American people about it, so much so that they had to issue a statement which says, ‘We regret the error,’ which is government speak for, ‘We got caught lying,'” Jordan told Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures.
It was revealed in December that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a member of the Jan. 6 committee, presented a graphic showing an altered text message between Jordan and Meadows. Jordan’s office acknowledged the congressman from Ohio did send the message to Meadows but stressed that it was a snippet of a message he “forwarded” from an attorney, Joseph Schmitz, who was expressing a legal theory about overturning the results of the 2020 election.
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The Jan. 6 panel apologized for the “error,” which was truncating the message with a period, and Schiff presenting it to the public without full context.
“The Select Committee on Monday created and provided Representative Schiff a graphic to use during the business meeting quoting from a text message from ‘a lawmaker’ to Mr. Meadows. The graphic read, ‘On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.’ In the graphic, the period at the end of that sentence was added inadvertently. The Select Committee is responsible for and regrets the error,” a spokesman for the select committee said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
In another example of a Jan. 6 committee member mis-portraying a text message, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) incorrectly described a message to Meadows describing a strategy to overturn the results of the 2020 election as coming from a House lawmaker. Anonymous sources told CNN that it was, as the news outlet put it, “an inadvertent error,” and a “Raskin source said the congressman learned of the error this week from CNN and confirmed the mistake with staff.” Raskin wrote a letter to correct the Congressional Record, according to the report, which noted the Jan. 6 panel declined to comment on the actual author of the text.
Members of the Jan. 6 panel have sought to draw a line connecting former President Donald Trump’s efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election to the Capitol riot. The violence briefly disrupted the process of lawmakers certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. The hearing on Thursday featured some never-before-seen video footage of the riot, as well as testimony from witnesses, including Trump’s former spokesman Jason Miller, who claimed the display lacked important context.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper after the hearing that the panel would be willing to release the full transcript of the deposition, but he declined to say when that might happen. Trump, for his part, chastised the panel, asserting, in part, that it “refuses to play any of the many positive witnesses and statements, refuses to talk of the Election Fraud and Irregularities that took place on a massive scale, and decided to use a documentary maker from Fake News ABC to spin only negative footage.”
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Jordan, along with Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), was blocked from participating on the Jan. 6 committee by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and the congressmen are now conducting their own counter-investigation. Jordan was also subpoenaed by the panel but has refused to cooperate.
Although the Jan. 6 committee has two Republican members, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who are Trump critics, Jordan argued that the country “sees it for what it is — a partisan political activity.” He also expressed support for the committee disclosing all the depositions and documents from its investigation to go beyond such displays as were presented during the “choreographed” hearing that took place on Thursday.
