TRUMP :The U.S. House Select Committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol “deleted and destroyed all of the information that they collected over two years.”
By Samantha Putterman ,Amy Sherman
In his first Oval Office TV interview since his second-term inauguration, President Donald Trump repeated a claim he’s said for months: that the U.S. House Select Committee that investigated him for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack deleted "all" evidence.
"What they did was criminal, that’s why they got pardoned," Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity Jan. 22, referring to former President Joe Biden’s preemptive presidential pardons for committee members such as former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. "They deleted and destroyed all of the information that they collected over two years."
Trump continued: "And you know why? Because it proved I was right. All of that information was deleted and destroyed. They deleted all of the information having to do with the 10,000 soldiers that I offered to Nancy Pelosi, and she's now on tape admitting it." (That’s a distortion of what Pelosi said.)
Trump made a similar statement shortly after his Jan. 20 swearing in, saying in a postinaugural speech that the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, "destroyed all evidence, they deleted everything, there’s virtually nothing left." In the Oval Office later that day, he again claimed committee members "destroyed all of the documents, they deleted all of the information, there’s no information."
Republicans and Democrats have long argued over the committee's records and whether certain information should have been archived. But there’s no basis for Trump’s claim that "all" of the evidence was deleted and destroyed.
Committee members — seven Democrats and two Republicans — said some videos and sensitive material were not included in the archive to protect witnesses, but that everything else was properly saved, including more than 100 testimony transcripts, depositions and documents that remain publicly available online.
Trump’s statements about Jan. 6, 2021, are back in the news because the day he took office he pardoned nearly all of the people convicted for their actions in the attack and commuted the sentences of 14 others.
On Jan. 22, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., announced a new select subcommittee chaired by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., "to continue our efforts to uncover the full truth" about Jan. 6.
A Trump spokesperson declined to comment. In a 2023 court filing, Trump’s lawyers argued that some committee evidence was missing, but they didn’t say "all" evidence was destroyed.
Trump’s statements about evidence being destroyed are part of his and his allies’ long-standing, two-pronged response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack: They downplay what happened that day while arguing that the committee covered up its investigation into the day’s events.
How claims about evidence destruction first surfaced
The Jan. 6 select committee concluded its work in December 2022 with an 845-page final report. It detailed Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the catalyst for the Capitol attack. The committee voted unanimously to recommend charges against Trump to the Justice Department.
Much of the committee’s work is available online. During its 18-month investigation, the group held 10 public hearings, interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses and collected more than 1 million documents. It released more than 100 transcripts of testimony, plus memos and emails, and videos, depositions and documents that are still publicly available online.
In June 2023, Loudermilk wrote to Thompson, the committee's chair, saying that some of the committee’s materials were not archived, namely video recordings of the interviews that had written transcripts.
Thompson’s July 2023 reply said more than 1 million records had been archived in coordination with the National Archives and Records Administration and the Committee on House Administration.
The committee sent some information deemed private and sensitive to the White House and Department of Homeland Security for archiving, Thompson wrote, to ensure that no information was released improperly. The committee dissolved before a full review of the materials was complete.
The material sent to the executive branch, Thompson wrote, contained "law enforcement sensitive operational details and private, personal information that, if released, could endanger the safety of witnesses."
What was in a subsequent House Republican report?
House Republicans in early 2023 opened their own investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, deeming the select committee’s work "incomplete."
In March 2024, the House Administation’s Subcommittee on Oversight, led by Loudermilk, released its first findings report, which accused the Jan. 6 committee of deleting records and promoting a political narrative against Trump instead of investigating the Capitol’s security failures.
The report included newly released testimony and said the Jan. 6 committee "failed to archive and subsequently provide the subcommittee any of its video recordings of witness interviews, as many as 900 interview summaries or transcripts, more than one terabyte of digital data, and over 100 deleted or encrypted documents."
The files were deleted days before Republicans took over the House majority in January 2023, the report said.
House Republicans said they intended to release a final report Jan. 6, 2025. No such report had been made public as of Jan. 24. PolitiFact contacted Loudermilk’s office to ask about the report’s status, but did not hear back by publication.
Just as he did in his comments to Hannity, Trump regularly references what he says was deleted or "destroyed" evidence involving "10,000 soldiers." But in March we looked into this claim and rated it False.
That’s because it involved an interview that was initially withheld from the public record while the Department of Homeland Security reviewed it for security concerns. The testimony said Trump floated the number of "10,000" National Guard troops but it didn’t substantiate Trump’s claim that he had ordered any deployment.
Trump lawyers sought subpoenas for some committee records
The Jan. 6 committee records discussion arose in the federal government’s prosecution of Trump for election subversion preceding the attack; the case was dropped after Trump won the 2024 election.
Records from the case show that Trump’s lawyers sought what they considered to be "missing records," filing an Oct. 11, 2023, motion that cited Loudermilk’s June 2023 letter that had said some of the committee’s materials, namely videos, were not archived. The motion did not go as far as Trump’s recent statement that "all" records from the entire investigation were destroyed. Instead, it said certain records weren’t archived or transferred to the Committee on House Administration, such as video recordings of transcribed interviews, depositions and intelligence information.
The Trump motion said he wanted "to determine if these records have been lost, destroyed, or altered."
Smith wrote in a response that the government had already provided Trump with select committee records and that those his motion identified were a "small number of transcripts" of interviews conducted subject to confidentiality agreements.
The judge assigned to the case, Tanya Chutkan, called the request a "fishing expedition," and denied Trump’s request for subpoenas.
