House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a select committee to investigate the insurrection, after Republicans blocked a bipartisan commission.
Former President Donald Trump's loudest defenders in the House are seeking appointment to a new select committee that's being convened to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
"I'm very upset about Jan. 6," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told Newsmax on Monday. "I didn't like what happened at the Capitol, but I would like to be on that new committee to make sure it's not a witch hunt against Trump supporters and that we can actually find out real answers like releasing over 14,000 hours of video."
Greene reiterated that the committee was "nothing but another witch hunt," but added, "I have time on my hands, right? I don't have any committee assignments, so I think it's the perfect thing to happen."
Politico reported that Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) — who has been criticized for fomenting the attack on Twitter that day — also want spots on the committee.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday introduced legislation to create a select committee to investigate the insurrection as a last resort, after Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan outside commission to probe the attack, which resulted in five deaths and millions worth of damage after a Trump-supporting mob broke into the building to try to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden's election win.
The committee will have 13 members, 8 of whom are appointed by Pelosi and five others who will be appointed "after consultation with" House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
McCarthy hasn't yet said who he will appoint.
If Greene is chosen, it would be the only committee on which she serves, as she told Newsmax on Monday. The Georgia congresswoman was stripped of her standing committee assignments in February over antisemitic, Islamophobic, and racist comments she made previously, as well as past endorsements of violence against elected officials like Pelosi on social media.
House Republicans — even the few who supported the bipartisan outside commission — have mostly spoken out against the idea of a select committee.
Rep. John Katko (R-NY), who helped come up with the framework of the outside committee that the majority of Republicans rejected, slammed the decision.
"It would be a turbo-charged partisan exercise, not an honest fact-finding body that the American people and Capitol Police deserve," Katko said in a statement.
Pelosi, however, is looking to blunt that attack by appointing a Republican member herself — though it's unclear who that will be.
Katko isn't the only Republican attacking the select committee as a partisan effort to hurt Trump.
"My concern is that this would be used as one more vehicle to attack President Trump," Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) told CNN of the select committee.
Jordan, for his part, was a member of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which spent years investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound and CIA annex in Libya, only to determine there was no wrongdoing by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the apparent main target of the investigation.
McCarthy himself later admitted that the select committee was little more than an effort to damage Clinton, who sought the presidency, but ultimately lost to Trump, in 2016.
In a 2015 appearance on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, McCarthy said, "Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought."
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
