Rep. Liz Cheney [R-Wyo], the vice chairwoman of the Jan. 6 committee, has been accused by panel staffers of using the committee as a vehicle for her political future.
Cheney’s influence over the committee’s final report angers several staffers on the panel, of which fifteen people that have worked or are working for the committee described what she’s doing, as pushing to focus the upcoming report primarily on the former president, Donald Trump.
Some findings that have nothing to do with Trump will either be pushed to the report’s appendix or left out of the final report entirely.
These findings include the failures of the police and the intelligence community to prevent the riot on January 6, details regarding the funding of the attack on January 6, and findings regarding militia groups and extremism.
One former committee staffer told the Washington Post, “We all came from respectable jobs and left what we were doing because we were told this would be an important fact-finding inquiry that would inform the public. But many of us became discouraged when [the committee] turned into a Cheney 2024 campaign.”
Jeremy Adler defended Liz Cheney
Some of the committee’s findings were left out due to the “subpar” performance of some staff members, according to Jeremy Adler, the communications director and deputy chief of staff for Cheney. Adler vehemently acknowledged that Cheney is focusing on Trump in the final report to ensure that an incident like Jan. 6 “never happens again.”
Per Adler, “Donald Trump is the first president in American history to try to overturn an election and thwart a peaceful transfer of power. So, yes, Liz is ‘prioritizing’ understanding what he did and how he did it, as well as making sure it never happens again.”
According to Tim Mulvey, a spokesman for the House Jan. 6 committee, “the investigation won’t be impacted by a few disgruntled staff members who are uninformed about many aspects of the committee’s ongoing work.”
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Many 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 contend that the final report will lack crucial lessons for the future if information pertinent to this mission statement is left out.