How partisan and savage was the House’s kangaroo committee on the Capitol incursion?
Run by a cadre of far-left Democrats and NeverTrumper Republican Liz Cheney, it was bad enough that Chris Miller, acting defense secretary at the end of former President Donald Trump’s administration, said he was threatened into remaining silent.
In an interview with the U.K. Daily Mail published on Friday, Miller said the committee told him they would “make his life hell” if he maintained that Trump authorized a National Guard presence to maintain order in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The National Guard was not deployed at the Capitol that day until after most of the violence had taken place.
Miller went on to say he felt “fearful” if he didn’t stay mum about his experience on the day of the incursion, due to repercussions from members of the Democrat-led committee.
At least one former Trump official — Peter Navarro, former director of the White House National Trade Council — has gone to prison for contempt of Congress in relation to the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation, and more might potentially follow.
“Miller’s bombshell claims follow a report by Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk that reveals the committee withheld a transcript from an interview with a top White House official where he told Vice Chair Liz Cheney and other staffers that Trump did want to deploy troops,” the Daily Mail reported.
“Cheney did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether she or any other members of the Select Committee corresponded with witnesses in a way that could be interpreted as threatening.”
However, Miller — who was acting secretary of defense for only two months before the Capitol incursion — said committee members told him that if he continued to maintain during media interviews that Trump had authorized the National Guard’s presence, he would be hauled in front of the committee for “hours” more testimony.
Was any part of the Jan. 6 Committee legitimate?
What set the Jan. 6 committee members off, apparently, was an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show in June of 2022 with former Trump security official Kash Patel.
A portion of that interview is below:
Both men said they were present at an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4, 2021, in which the then-president Trump gave verbal authorization to mobilize the National Guard to deal with potential threats on the day of the Electoral College certification — which, obviously, turned into the Capitol incursion.
The fallout from the interview came immediately, Miller told the Daily Mail.
“The two of us were on [the Fox News show] and the next day my lawyer got a call from the Jan. 6 staff director — I forgot exactly who it was — but basically saying, very legalistic: ‘Well, if your client has additional information he wants to share, we’d be happy to have him re-interviewed,”’ Miller told the Daily Mail.
“That piece Kash and I did, it hit a nerve,” Miller said. “It was like, ‘d***, that sure got some attention.’
“It was more that latent threat of: ‘If you want to keep going on TV, we’re gonna drag you in here again for additional hours of hearing testimony.’ So that was the nature of that whole thing,” he said, telling the Daily Mail he didn’t have the “resources to continue to battle” members of the kangaroo committee.
“It was the latent threat of the government continuing to intrude into my life,” he said.
Now, it’s worth noting that his statements on “Hannity” seemed to be at odds with the sworn testimony he gave before the committee, according to the U.K.’s Independent; when asked about deployment of the National Guard, he said, “I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature.”
Furthermore, as NPR noted, it wasn’t just the president who determined what kind of National Guard presence would be at the Capitol on Jan. 6; Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser wanted a minimal National Guard and police presence to avoid the optics of a heavy force protecting the Capitol like during the George Floyd riots of the summer of 2020.
According to The Hill, she told the committee she thought the protesters were “friendly” to law enforcement due to a perception they were on the same side.
“People thought they were friendly to law enforcement and that they loved their country,” she said. “People didn’t think that these white nationalists would overthrow the Capitol building.”
Whatever the case may be, however, the broader point is that we have an acting secretary of Defense apparently afraid to speak his mind because of the havoc the Jan. 6 committee threatened to wreak on his life.
Miller told the Daily Mail that he refused to discuss how he was treated by the panel until now, well after it was dissolved by the Republican majority that took over the House after the 2022 midterms.
“I didn’t talk about it with anybody else because of the fear or the concern,” Miller said.
“I wasn’t communicating with anybody, because I knew any interactions I had on it would result in me having to … acknowledge that I’d been in communications with other people. And then that just sort of opens up a whole can of worms with the investigators that I just didn’t want to do.
“It was much easier just to not be involved with anybody or talk to anybody about this stuff because it was going to cause conflict and difficulties with the investigating team,” he continued. “So I didn’t talk to other people, quite simply.”
And keep in mind, Miller was a minor player in all this — albeit one who could confirm that Trump had authorized the National Guard to the Capitol during the incursion.
That didn’t fit with the committee’s narrative, however. And if you had something to say that didn’t fit with the prefabricated conclusion the committee began with, you’d best shut the heck up. After all, this was a classic case of a court that declares the defendant will have a fair trial before he gets hung.
Nor was he the only witness treated this way, according to a Republican communications strategist familiar with those who came before the committee.
“Knowing how other witnesses close to me were treated, it wouldn’t surprise me if people in media were also threatened by the committee to stop discussing this issue,” Erica Knight told the Mail.
And Miller said that the implied threat was designed to “make my life hell” if he continued to state unpleasant truths in the media — particularly since it disrupted the narrative committee member and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney and her pals were trying to weave.
“I’m sure that Cheney was looking at the optics and was like, ‘these people are a serious threat to my narrative’ that she tried to establish,” Miller said.
“Now, you know, they’ll say, ‘No, that wasn’t it at all. We just wanted to make sure that we understood all the nuance and complexity.’ But I definitely interpreted it as … don’t fight city hall type thing.”
And that’s how the Jan. 6 committee’s report became so skewed. The day that will live in infamy for ardent MSNBC watchers became a threat to America’s very democracy. Nor is what happened to Miller an outlier.
Consider the amount of credence given to the dubious testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who told the committee she heard Trump tried to grab the wheel of his limo from the Secret Service and direct the vehicle toward the Capitol.
Never mind that the Secret Service agents in the limo said this never happened. Details, details. That doesn’t sound nearly as exciting, doesn’t it?
The Jan. 6 committee was nothing more than a televised spectacle designed to strike fear into the hearts of American voters and raise the profile of the Democrats and RINOs who populated it. Period.
Pretty much the only conclusions it reached we can be sure are actual facts are that the events it dealt with happened mostly on Jan. 6, 2021, and that Donald John Trump was still president at the time. Everything else can’t be trusted because it was either wildly exaggerated or fabricated out of whole cloth — and anyone who injected reality into the whole enterprise was shut up one way or another.
