United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack

The United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (commonly referred to as the January 6th Committee) was a select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives established to investigate the U.S. Capitol attack.
After refusing to concede the 2020 U.S. presidential election and perpetuating false and disproven claims of widespread voter fraud, then-President Donald Trump summoned a mob of protestors to the Capitol as the electoral votes were being counted on January 6, 2021. During the House Committee's subsequent investigation, people gave sworn testimony that Trump knew he lost the election. The Committee issued a subpoena requiring Trump to testify, identifying him as "the center of the first and only effort by any U.S. President to overturn an election and obstruct the peaceful transition of power". He sued the committee and never testified.
On December 19, 2022, the Committee voted unanimously to refer Trump and the lawyer John Eastman to the U.S. Department of Justice for prosecution. The committee recommended charging Trump with obstruction of an official proceeding; conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to make a false statement; and attempts to "incite", "assist" or "aid or comfort" an insurrection. Obstruction and conspiracy to defraud were also the recommended charges for Eastman. The committee simultaneously released a summary of its findings, and it published the remainder of its 845-page final report three days later. That week, it also began publishing interview transcripts.
The Committee interviewed over a thousand people and reviewed over a million documents. Some members of Trump's inner circle cooperated, while others defied the committee. For refusing to testify:
The committee was formed through a largely party-line vote on July 1, 2021, and it dissolved in early January 2023. Its membership was a point of significant political contention. The only two House Republicans to vote to establish the Committee were also the only two Republicans to serve on it: Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. The Republican National Committee censured them for their participation.
On May 19, 2021, in the aftermath of the January 6 United States Capitol attack, the House voted to form an independent bicameral commission to investigate the attack, similar to the 9/11 Commission. The bipartisan Bill passed the House 252–175, with thirty-five Republicans voting in favor. The large number of defections was considered a rebuke of Minority Leader McCarthy, who reversed course and whipped against the proposal, after initially deputizing Rep. John Katko to negotiate for Republicans. The proposal was defeated by a filibuster from Republicans in the Senate. In late May, when it had become apparent that the filibuster would not be overcome, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi indicated that she would appoint a select committee to investigate the events as a fallback option.
On June 30, 2021, H.Res.503, "Establishing the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol", passed the House 222–190, with all Democratic members and two Republican members, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, voting in favor. Sixteen Republican members did not vote. The resolution empowered Pelosi to appoint eight members to the committee, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy could appoint five members "in consultation" with the Speaker. Pelosi indicated that she would name a Republican as one of her eight appointees.
On July 1, Pelosi appointed eight members, seven Democrats and one Republican, Liz Cheney (R-WY). Bennie Thompson (D-MS) was appointed committee chairman.
On July 19, McCarthy announced his five selections, recommending Jim Banks (R-IN) serve as Ranking Member, along with Jim Jordan (R-OH), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), and Troy Nehls (R-TX). Banks, Jordan, and Nehls had voted to overturn the Electoral College results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Banks and Jordan had also signed onto the Supreme Court case Texas v. Pennsylvania to invalidate the ballots of voters in four states.
On July 21, Thompson announced that he would investigate Trump as part of the inquiry into the Capitol attack. Hours later, Pelosi announced that she had informed McCarthy that she was rejecting Jordan and Banks, citing concerns for the investigation's integrity and relevant actions and statements made by the two members. She approved the recommendations of the other three. Rather than suggesting two replacements, McCarthy insisted he would not appoint anyone unless all five of his choices were approved. When McCarthy pulled all of his picks, he eliminated all Trump defenders on the committee and cleared the field for Pelosi to control the committee's entire makeup and workings. This was widely interpreted as a costly political miscalculation by McCarthy.
On July 25, after McCarthy rescinded all of his selections, Pelosi announced that she had appointed Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the ten House Republicans who voted for Trump's second impeachment, to the committee. Pelosi also hired a Republican, former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA), as an outside committee staffer or advisor. Cheney voiced her support and pushed for the involvement of both.
On February 4, 2022, the Republican National Committee voted to censure Cheney and Kinzinger, which it had never before done to any sitting congressional Republican. The resolution formally dropped "all support of them as members of the Republican Party", arguing that their work on the select committee was hurting Republican prospects in the midterm elections. Kinzinger had already announced on October 29, 2021, that he would not run for reelection. Cheney lost the primary for her reelection on August 16, 2022.
The committee's chair was Bennie Thompson, and the vice chair was Liz Cheney. Seven Democrats and two Republicans sat on the committee.
In July 2021, Thompson announced the senior staff:
In August 2021, Thompson announced additional staff:
In November 2022, Thompson disclosed the existence of a subcommittee to handle "outstanding issues" including unanswered subpoenas and whether to send transcripts of interviews to the DOJ. The subcommittee had been established about one month earlier with Raskin as chair, along with Cheney, Lofgren, and Schiff. Thompson said he selected them because "they're all lawyers".
On January 20, 2025, hours before President Biden left office, he gave a preemptive pardon to all committee members and staffers, given President-elect Trump's threats against them, as well as to the four police officers who testified.
The investigation commenced with a public hearing on July 27, 2021, at which four police officers testified. As of the end of 2021, it had interviewed more than 300 witnesses and obtained more than 35,000 documents, and those totals continued to rise. By May 2022, it had interviewed over 1,000 witnesses; some of those interviews were recorded. By October 2022, it had obtained over 1,000,000 documents and reviewed hundreds of hours of videos (such as security camera and documentary footage). During the pendency of the investigation, the select committee publicly communicated some of its information.
The select committee split its multi-pronged investigation into multiple color-coded teams, each focusing on a specific topic like funding, individuals' motivations, organizational coalitions, and how Trump may have pressured other politicians. These were:
The select committee's investigation and its findings were multi-faceted.
A reform of election certification procedures (as governed by the Electoral Count Act of 1887) was passed in the December 2022 omnibus spending bill. Committee members had begun collaborating on this reform in 2021.
The select committee's findings may also be used in arguments to hold individuals, notably Donald Trump, legally accountable.
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) probed the months-long efforts to falsely declare that the election was rigged, including pressure on the DOJ, the fake-electors scheme, and the events of January 6 itself.
While the investigations by the House select committee and the Justice Department were ongoing, the judicial branch made related observations and rulings. In March 2022, federal judge David Carter said it was "more likely than not" that Trump engaged in a conspiracy with John Eastman to commit federal crimes. He described their attempt as "a coup in search of a legal theory".
On November 18, 2022, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the appointment of John L. "Jack" Smith as the Special Counsel to oversee the DOJ's ongoing investigations into the FBI investigation into Donald Trump's handling of government documents as well the January 6 investigation. Garland praised Smith's experience and said: "I am confident that this appointment will not slow the completion of these investigations." Smith promised to investigate "independently and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice ... to whatever outcome the facts and the law dictate."
The House select committee shared some information with the DOJ, but it waited until it had finished its work in December 2022 before turning over everything. The DOJ had sent a letter on April 20, 2022, asking for transcripts of past and future interviews. Thompson, the committee chair, told reporters he did not intend to give the DOJ "full access to our product" especially when "we haven't completed our own work". Instead, the select committee negotiated for a partial information exchange. On June 15, the DOJ repeated its request. They gave an example of a problem they had encountered: The trial of the five Proud Boys indicted for seditious conspiracy had been rescheduled for the end of 2022 because the prosecutors and the defendants' counsel did not want to start the trial without the relevant interview transcripts. On July 12, 2022, the committee announced it was negotiating with the DOJ about the procedure for information-sharing and that the committee had "started producing information" related to the DOJ's request for transcripts.
On December 19, 2022, the House select committee publicly voted to recommend that the DOJ bring criminal charges against Trump (a long-anticipated move) as well as against John Eastman. Some critics had argued against making criminal referrals, as such a recommendation by a congressional committee has no legal force and could appear to politically taint the DOJ's investigation. However, a committee spokesperson had said on December 6 that criminal referrals would be "a final part" of the committee's investigative work. Schiff acknowledged on December 11 that any referral would be "symbolic" but was nevertheless "important" — he had said in September that he hoped the committee would unanimously refer Trump to the DOJ — while Representative Raskin said on December 13, "Everybody has made his or her own bed in terms of their conduct or misconduct."
On August 1, 2023, a grand jury indicted Trump on four counts. The prosecution continued until Trump won the 2024 presidential election. On November 25, 2024, special counsel Jack Smith filed to drop the charges against Trump, and Judge Chutkan approved the request and dismissed the case. Smith resigned his role of special counsel in January 2025 before Trump's inauguration.
In September 2021, the select committee subpoenaed former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Meadows initially cooperated, but in December, without providing all requested documents, he sued to block the two congressional subpoenas. On December 14, 2021, the full House voted to hold Meadows in contempt of Congress. In a July 15, 2022 amicus brief filed at the request of U.S. District Court Judge Carl J. Nichols, the DOJ acknowledged that the House subpoena had been justified and that Meadows had only "qualified" immunity given that Trump was no longer in office. On October 31, 2022, the judge ruled that the congressional subpoenas were "protected legislative acts" that were "legitimately tied to Congress's legislative functions".
Although the congressional subpoenas were valid, DOJ decided not to criminally charge him for defying them. In 2022, Meadows did comply with a DOJ subpoena in the DOJ investigation of January 6. In 2023, he was indicted in Georgia for his alleged role in election interference in that state.
Meadows had routinely burned documents in his office fireplace after meetings during the transition period; Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the committee that she had seen him do this a dozen times between December 2020 and mid-January 2021.
In late 2021, before Meadows stopped cooperating, he provided thousands of emails and text messages that revealed efforts to overturn the election results:
Meadows also participated in a call with a Freedom Caucus group including Rudy Giuliani, Representative Jim Jordan, and Representative Scott Perry during which they planned to encourage Trump supporters to march to the Capitol on January 6.
Meadows also exchanged post-election text messages with Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in which they expressed support of Trump's claims of election fraud. On November 5, in the first of 29 text messages, Ginni Thomas sent to Meadows a link to a YouTube video about the election. She emailed Arizona and Wisconsin lawmakers on November 9 to encourage them to choose different electors, exchanged emails with John Eastman, and attended the rally on January 6.
Some of the communications revealed Trump allies who privately expressed disagreement with the events of January 6 while defending Trump in public:
In mid-2022, CNN spoke to over a dozen people who had texted Meadows that day, and all of them said they believed that Trump should have tried to stop the attack.
Meadows pointed the committee toward Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel (now owning a bar in Texas) who specialized in psychological operations and who later became a Trump campaign associate. Waldron was associated with former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn and other military-intelligence veterans who played key roles in spreading false information to allege the election had been stolen from Trump.
Waldron had summarized a strategy for overturning the election results. His PowerPoint presentation recommended that Trump declare a national security emergency to delay the January 6 electoral certification, invalidate all ballots cast by machine, and order the military to seize and recount all paper ballots. (Meadows claims he personally did not act on this plan.) A 36-page version appeared to have been created on January 5, and Meadows received a version that day. He eventually provided a 38-page version to the committee. It was among the most revealing documents he provided.
Waldron also originated the idea of a military seizure of voting machines, according to Bernard Kerik's subsequent testimony. The idea of seizing voting machines was proposed as an executive order in two nearly identical drafts dated December 16, both of which Politico published. One of the drafts had apparently been created by attorney and One America News anchor Christina Bobb, who had also been present at the Willard Hotel command center. That draft was found in emails between Waldron, Flynn, Kerik, Washington attorney Katherine Friess, and Texas entrepreneur Russell Ramsland, which Politico also published.
Meadows testified that he organized a daily morning call beginning January 7, 2021, with Mike Pompeo and Mark Milley.
As of August 2023, the extent of Meadows's cooperation in various investigations remained unknown to the public. Prosecutors in the Georgia indictment reportedly do not intend to offer him a plea deal. He has said he wants to be tried separately from the other Georgia defendants. The U.S. Supreme Court denied his request to remove his case to federal court.
One of the main challenges to the committee's investigation was Trump's use of legal tactics to try to block the release of the White House communication records held at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). He succeeded in delaying the release of the documents for about five months. The committee received the documents on January 20, 2022.
Some of the documents had been previously torn up by Trump and taped back together by NARA staff. Trump is said to have routinely shredded and flushed records by his own hand, as well as to have asked staff to place them in burn bags, throughout his presidency. Additionally, as the presidential diarist testified to the committee in March 2022, the Oval Office did not send the diarist detailed information about Trump's daily activities on January 5 and 6, 2021.
Trump's phone records from the day of the attack, as provided by NARA to the committee, did not log any calls during the seven-and-a-half hours that the Capitol was under siege, suggesting he was using a "burner" cell phone during that time. He is said to have routinely used burner phones during his presidency. When the committee subpoenaed his personal communication records, his lawyers claimed he had no such records.
Trump tried to hide the fact that he had pressured the Defense Secretary and DOJ to seize voting machines immediately after the election in six states where he had lost. To prevent the Committee gaining access to relevant White House records, he sought an injunction from the Supreme Court, which dismissed his request on January 19, 2022.
The committee began its request for the NARA records in August 2021. Trump asserted executive privilege over the documents. Then president Joe Biden rejected that claim, as did a federal judge (who noted that Trump was no longer president), the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. The committee agreed to a Biden administration request for NARA to withhold certain sensitive documents about unrelated national security matters but continued to litigate until it received the potentially relevant records.
From the beginning of the investigation, Trump told Republican leaders not to cooperate with the committee. While many testified voluntarily, the committee also issued subpoenas to legally compel others' testimony. Some people who were subpoenaed refused to testify: Jeffrey Clark, Roger Stone, John Eastman, Michael Flynn, Alex Jones, and Kelli Ward pleaded their Fifth Amendment rights, while Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino were found in contempt of Congress. In December 2021, Michael Flynn sued to block a subpoena for his phone records and to delay his testimony, though a federal judge dismissed his suit within a day.
Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson spoke to the committee several times in early 2022 while represented by Stefan Passantino, a Trump ally who wanted her to skirt the committee's questions. She spoke to the committee without Passantino's knowledge; former White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin was her backchannel connection for the additional testimony. Hutchinson later dismissed Passantino, hired Jody Hunt instead, and had another closed-door deposition on June 20, 2022, a week before she appeared at a public hearing. The committee would later recommend that Passantino face charges for witness tampering. In December 2024, the House Administration oversight subcommittee, led by Representative Barry Loudermilk, issued a report saying that Liz Cheney should be the one to be criminally investigated for witness tampering, alleging that she had turned Hutchinson against Passantino. However, Representative Lofgren pointed out that, under Article One of the Constitution, members of Congress cannot be prosecuted for doing their work. On January 6, 2025, Representative Joseph Morelle, released a report containing an email from Hutchinson's lawyer denying that Hutchinson and Cheney had any "improper communications".
Bill Stepien, Trump's final campaign manager, was subpoenaed and planned to testify live for the second public hearing on June 13, 2022. However, he canceled his appearance an hour before the hearing started, as his wife went into labor. The select committee instead aired clips of Stepien's previously recorded deposition; the scramble to rearrange the presentation delayed the start of the nationally televised hearing by 45 minutes.
On October 21, 2022, the committee subpoenaed Trump for documents and testimony. They requested all his communications on the day of the Capitol attack and many of his political communications in the preceding months. On November 9, Trump's lawyers wrote to the committee saying he possessed "no documents" relevant to the subpoena. On November 11, they sued to block the subpoena, arguing that the committee could obtain the information from sources other than Trump.
Pence chose not to speak to the select committee, though the committee had long deliberated calling him. On January 4, 2022, Chair Thompson told reporters that Pence should "do the right thing and come forward and voluntarily talk to the committee". While acknowledging that the committee had not formally invited Pence to speak to them, Thompson suggested: "if he offered, we'd gladly accept." The committee reportedly considered Pence's testimony particularly important, though, in April, Thompson told reporters they would not bother calling him, especially having already confirmed important information through his former aides Marc Short and Greg Jacob. On August 17, Pence told an audience at Saint Anselm College that he was waiting for the committee to invite him: "If there was an invitation to participate, I'd consider it." He described his experience of the attack on the Capitol in his autobiography, which was scheduled to be published a week after the November 2022 midterm elections. As of late November, Pence was reportedly more interested in testifying before the DOJ. "I think it’s sad that he didn’t want to come to us", Representative Pete Aguilar told CNN in early December 2022.
Soon after the attack on the Capitol, the Secret Service assigned new phones. In February 2021, the office of Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, a Trump appointee, learned that text messages of Secret Service agents had been lost. He considered sending data specialists to attempt to retrieve the messages, but a decision was made against it. In June 2021, DHS asked for text messages from 24 individuals—including the heads for Trump and Pence security, Robert Engel and Tim Giebels—and did not receive them. In October 2021, DHS considered publicizing the Secret Service's delays. On July 26, 2022, Chairman Thompson, in his capacity as Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Carolyn Maloney, Chair of the House Oversight & Reforms Committee, jointly wrote to the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency about Cuffari's failure to report the lost text messages and asked CIGIE chair Allison Lerner to replace Cuffari with a new Inspector General who could investigate the matter. Senator Dick Durbin, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked Attorney General Garland to investigate the missing text messages. Biden had made a campaign promise to never fire an inspector general during his tenure as POTUS, and despite calls for him to dismiss Cuffari, Cuffari retained his role throughout the Biden administration.
On August 1, 2022, House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson reiterated calls for Cuffari to step down due to a "lack of transparency" that could be "jeopardizing the integrity" of crucial investigations regarding the missing Secret Service text messages. That same day, an official inside the DHS inspector general's office told Politico that Cuffari and his staff are "uniquely unqualified to lead an Inspector General's office, and ... the crucial oversight mission of the DHS OIG has been compromised." Congress also obtained a July 2021 e-mail, from deputy inspector general Thomas Kait, who told senior DHS officials there was no longer a need for any Secret Service phone records or text messages. Efforts to collect communications related to Jan. 6 were therefore shutdown by Kait just six weeks after the internal DHS investigation began. The Guardian wrote that "taken together, the new revelations appear to show that the chief watchdog for the Secret Service and the DHS took deliberate steps to stop the retrieval of texts it knew were missing, and then sought to hide the fact that it had decided not to pursue that evidence."
On August 2, 2022, CNN reported that relevant text messages from January 6, 2021, were also deleted from the phones of Trump-appointed officials at the Pentagon, despite the fact that FOIA requests were filed days after the attack on the Capitol. The Secret Service was later reported to have been aware of online threats against lawmakers before the attack on the Capitol, according to documents obtained by the House select committee.
Trump's Save America PAC has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to lawyers representing over a dozen witnesses called by the committee. On September 1, 2022, Trump said on a right-wing radio show that he had recently met supporters in his office. He said he was "financially supporting" them, adding: "It's a disgrace what they've done to them."
The American Conservative Union provided legal defense funds for some people who resist the committee. The organization said it only assisted people who do not cooperate with the committee and who opposed its mission, according to chairman Matt Schlapp.
Though the Republican National Committee had long insisted that the committee is invalid and should not be allowed to investigate, a federal judge found on May 1, 2022, that the committee's power is legitimate.
The House select committee began its investigation with a preliminary public hearing on July 27, 2021, called "The Law Enforcement Experience on January 6th". Capitol and District of Columbia police testified, describing their personal experiences on the day of the attack, and graphic video footage was shown.
In 2022, the Committee held ten live televised public hearings that presented evidence of Trump's seven-part plan to overturn the 2020 elections; this included live interviews under oath (of many Republicans and some Trump loyalists), as well as recorded sworn deposition testimony and video footage from other sources. An Executive Summary of the committee's findings was published on December 19, 2022; a Final Report was published on December 22, 2022.
During the first hearing on June 9, 2022, committee chair Bennie Thompson and vice-chair Liz Cheney said that President Donald Trump tried to stay in power even though he lost the 2020 presidential election. Thompson called it a "coup". The committee shared footage of the attack, discussed the involvement of the Proud Boys, and included testimony from a documentary filmmaker and a member of the Capitol Police.
The second hearing on June 13, 2022, focused on evidence showing that Trump knew he lost and that most of his inner circle knew claims of fraud did not have merit. William Barr testified that Trump had "become detached from reality" because he continued to promote conspiracy theories and pushed the stolen election myth without "interest in what the actual facts were."
The third hearing on June 16, 2022, examined how Trump and others pressured Vice President Mike Pence to selectively discount electoral votes and overturn the election by unconstitutional means, using John Eastman's fringe legal theories as justification.
The fourth hearing on June 21, 2022, included appearances by election officials from Arizona and Georgia who testified they were pressured to "find votes" for Trump and change results in their jurisdictions. The committee revealed attempts to organize fake slates of alternate electors and established that "Trump had a direct and personal role in this effort."
The fifth hearing on June 23, 2022, focused on Trump's pressure campaign on the Justice Department to rubber stamp his narrative of a stolen election, the insistence on numerous debunked election fraud conspiracy theories, requests to seize voting machines, and Trump's effort to install Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general.
The exclusive witness of the sixth hearing on June 28, 2022, was Cassidy Hutchinson, top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. She testified that White House officials anticipated violence days in advance of January 6; that Trump knew supporters at the Ellipse rally were armed with weapons including AR-15s yet asked to relax security checks at his speech; and that Trump planned to join the crowd at the Capitol and became irate when the Secret Service refused his request. Closing the hearing, Cheney presented evidence of witness tampering.
The seventh hearing on July 12, 2022, showed how Roger Stone and Michael Flynn connected Trump to domestic militias like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys that helped coordinate the attack.
The eighth hearing on July 21, 2022, presented evidence and details of Trump's refusal to call off the attack on the Capitol, despite hours of pleas from officials and insiders. According to the New York Times, the committee delivered two significant public messages: Rep. Liz Cheney made the case that Trump could never "be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again", while Rep. Bennie Thompson called for legal "accountability" and "stiff consequences" to "overcome the ongoing threat to our democracy."
The ninth hearing on October 13, 2022, presented video of Roger Stone and evidence that some Trump associates planned to claim victory in the 2020 election regardless of the official results. The committee voted unanimously to subpoena Trump for documents and testimony, and a subpoena was issued one week later. Trump refused to comply.
The tenth hearing on December 19, 2022, convened to present a final overview of their investigative work to date, and the committee recommended that former President Donald Trump, John Eastman, and others be referred for legal charges. The committee also recommended that the House Ethics Committee follow up on Rep. Kevin McCarthy (CA), Rep. Jim Jordan (OH), Scott Perry (PA), and Andy Biggs (AZ) refusing to answer subpoenas. The votes were unanimous. Immediately after the hearing, the committee released a 154-page executive summary of its findings.
On December 19, 2022, the committee criminally referred Trump to the DOJ for four suspected crimes.
Simultaneously, the committee referred John Eastman to the DOJ for the first two of those same crimes. This move was supported by a June 7, 2022, ruling by Judge David Carter. Carter had decided that one email in John Eastman's possession, sent before January 6, contained likely evidence of a crime and that Eastman must disclose it to the House committee under the crime-fraud exception of attorney-client privilege.
The committee suggested that the DOJ look into two additional charges for Trump: conspiracy to prevent someone from holding office or performing the duties of their office, and seditious conspiracy. It noted that convictions on both of these charges had recently been delivered in the high-profile Oath Keepers trial.
Trump and Eastman were the only individuals the committee criminally referred to the DOJ. Although the committee said that Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark had been “actors” in the plot, it decided it lacked sufficient evidence to refer them, especially given certain individuals' unwillingness to cooperate with the investigation. "We trust that the Department of Justice will do its job", Raskin said.
On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury indicted Trump on four counts, three of which resemble the charges recommended by the House select committee. (Trump was not charged with incitement of insurrection.) Additionally, among the co-conspirators identified in the indictment were four who'd been previously named by the House committee: John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, and Kenneth Chesebro. Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges. A trial was scheduled but never held. In January 2025, the special counsel resigned. The special counsel's 137-page final report, dated January 7, 2025, was publicly released. In a footnote, it mentions that the special counsel had made use of the House select committee's December 2022 report "as well as certain materials received from the Committee," though "those materials comprised a small part of the Office's investigative record" and the special counsel had verified all facts it used when deciding to prosecute the case. Through the court process of discovery, the special counsel's office gave Trump's team access to "all materials received from the Select Committee." Noting that Trump had attempted to equate the House select committee and the Justice Department's special counsel's office, the special counsel points out that the district court had rejected this allegation as Trump had provided no "adequate basis" for it.
Under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, anyone who has "engaged" in insurrection is ineligible to hold public office, but it does not say how to prove this offense (e.g., if it bans only those who have been criminally convicted of insurrection) nor who deems a candidate ineligible to hold office and who enforces the ban. In early 2022, the eligibility of two candidates in North Carolina and Georgia was questioned, but ultimately not denied, on this basis. Later that year, a county commissioner from New Mexico became the first elected official since the Civil War era to be removed from office for participating in an insurrection. On December 15, 2022, House Democrats introduced a bill that would prevent Trump specifically from running for office again. In 2023, lawsuits were filed in several states, and on December 19, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump should be removed from the ballot in that state, based on the 14th Amendment. However, on March 4, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that no states have the power to remove Trump from the ballot. The court decided that this power lies with Congress. Trump ran for the presidency and was elected in November 2024. Upon his inauguration in January 2025, he pardoned well over a thousand people who had been convicted of offenses related to the riot. Only 14 were not pardoned, and he let them out of prison anyway by commuting their sentences to "time served".
The select committee's work also aided the State of Georgia's investigation into alleged solicitations of election fraud. On May 2, 2022, Fulton County's District Attorney Fani Willis opened a special grand jury to consider criminal charges, and on August 14, 2023, a Georgia grand jury indicted Trump on 13 counts. The identities of Trump's 18 co-defendants and 30 unindicted co-conspirators significantly overlap with the people identified by the House committee. In particular, Chesebro was charged with seven felonies related to electoral vote obstruction, and he pleaded guilty to one of them: conspiracy to file false documents.
On July 18, 2023, Michigan indicted 16 people who signed fake documents. At least two, Kathy Berden and Mayra Rodriguez, had been interviewed by the select committee.
On December 5, 2023, Nevada indicted six people in the fake elector scheme. At least two, Michael J. McDonald and James DeGraffenreid, had been interviewed by the select committee.
On April 23, 2024, Arizona indicted eleven fake electors and seven Trump allies. The Trump allies were Christina Bobb, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Boris Epshteyn, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and Mike Roman. The indictment also described five unindicted coconspirators, including Trump and Chesebro.
On June 4, 2024, Wisconsin indicted three people, including Chesebro.
In late December 2022, anticipating that the new Congress to be seated in January would not allow it to continue its work, the committee released many of its witness testimony transcripts.
On December 21, the committee released the first batch. The transcripts detailed testimony from 34 witnesses who mostly invoked the Fifth Amendment and avoided answering questions, including:
On December 22, more transcripts were released. They revealed that Cassidy Hutchinson had given additional testimony on September 14–15, 2022, in which she claimed that Trump allies, including her "Trump world" attorney Stefan Passantino, had pressured her not to talk to the committee. (Passantino would later sue the committee for $67 million in damages to his reputation. He was represented by Jesse Binall.)
On December 23, 46 more interview transcripts were released, including:
On December 30, the committee released more transcripts.
On December 22, 2022, the final report was published online. The report was final because the committee itself expired two weeks later when the 117th Congress ended.
Several publishing houses printed it. An edition by Penguin Random House had a foreword by Schiff, one by Celadon Books had a preface by David Remnick and an epilogue by Raskin, and one by HarperCollins had an introduction by Ari Melber.
In October 2022, Representative Lofgren said the committee would likely provide an unredacted version of its final report to the DOJ at the same time the public received a redacted version. In December, Representative Schiff said the committee would publish its evidence so the newly elected Republican-majority House of Representatives (soon to be sworn in for the 118th Congress) could not "cherry-pick certain evidence and mislead the country with some false narrative."
As the committee wrapped up its work in late 2022, the writers of the final report were directed to focus more on Trump's alleged crimes (as researched by the "Gold Team" and revealed in the public hearings) and less on law enforcement's failure to address radicalization, armed groups, and violent threats. Some committee staff expressed concerns that Vice Chair Liz Cheney wanted an anti-Trump report to bolster her own political future. Another person quoted by The Washington Post anonymously rebutted that notion, saying that Cheney was striving to produce a narrative more compelling than that of "the Mueller report, which nobody read". On November 27, 2022, Representative Schiff said the committee members hadn't yet reached consensus on the report's focus but also were "close to the putting down the pen".
Before the November 2022 midterm elections, the committee held public hearings but did not yet release any written report.
On December 19, 2022, the same day it made the criminal referrals, the committee published an "Executive Summary" as an introduction to its final report. It outlined 17 findings central to its reasoning for criminal referrals. Paraphrased, they are:
The report placed blame on "one man", former U.S. President Donald Trump, for inciting the riot. It provided detail about a robust, organized campaign to assemble and deliver a bogus slate of electors and named lesser known Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro as the plot's architect. According to the final report, Donald Trump "sought to corrupt the US Department of Justice" by pleading with department officials to make false statements regarding the presidential elections, had failed to deploy the DC National Guard during the attack despite having the authority to do so, and made "multiple efforts" to contact witnesses summoned to testify before the House Select Committee. The report accused Donald Trump of engaging in a criminal “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the results of the 2020 election."
In the two months between the election and the Capitol attack, Trump allies engaged in “at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation” of state election officials. They had 68 communications with those officials (including meetings, phone calls, and texts), and they made 125 social media posts about those officials.
According to the committee's original authorization, it was supposed to terminate 30 days after filing its final report. The 118th Congress convened two weeks after the committee published the report, rendering the 30-day timeframe irrelevant.
The committee sought to identify whether the White House was involved in planning the Capitol attack and whether Trump personally had advance knowledge of it. The committee considered issuing subpoenas for call records or testimony of senior Trump administration officials including Meadows, Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino and former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale.
The Select Committee's subpoena power comes pursuant to House Resolution 503, Section 5: Procedures:
According to the Congressional Research Service, the chair (or a person they designate) can initiate and authorize subpoenas without consulting the vice-chair or other committee members.
In the January 6th investigation, some people testified and provided documents voluntarily, while others were legally compelled by subpoenas. The committee did not always publicly announce the subpoenas it issued.
Notably:
According to several reports, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had warned Republican members that if they allowed Speaker Pelosi to appoint them to the select committee, they would be stripped of all their other committee assignments and should not expect to receive any future ones from Pelosi. In an interview with Forbes, Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said "Who gives a shit?" and added, "When you've got people who say crazy stuff and you're not gonna make that threat, but you make that threat to truth-tellers, you've lost any credibility."
Republican House Leader McCarthy called the rejection of his initial recommendations "unprecedented" in a phone call with Pelosi. In a press conference, he labeled her a "lame duck speaker" out to destroy the institution. The Freedom Caucus pushed for McCarthy to file a motion to vacate the speakership, and punish Cheney and Kinzinger for accepting their appointments to the committee. McCarthy later dubbed them "Pelosi Republicans". Republicans also stated that if they won the House majority in the 2022 midterm elections, they would come after Democratic committee assignments, targeting Eric Swalwell and Ilhan Omar. Republican House Whip Steve Scalise stated that Pelosi had removed any credibility from the committee for rejecting their recommended members and opted instead for a political narrative. Republicans Scott Perry, Chip Roy, and Kelly Armstrong expressed their disdain for both Cheney and Kinzinger and questioned their loyalty to the House Republican Conference, pushing for them to be stripped of their committee assignments. Jim Banks and Mike Rogers stated that the two GOP committee members would be stuck to Pelosi's narrative of events. Cheney and Kinzinger both dismissed comments from their colleagues.
After Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected two of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's picks for the committee and appointed Adam Schiff, The Wall Street Journal editorial board criticized her; while acknowledging that McCarthy's picks were partisan, it claimed that Schiff had "lied repeatedly about the evidence concerning the Trump campaign's collusion with Russia". The editorial board posited, "if Mrs. Pelosi thinks the evidence for her conclusion is persuasive, why would she not want to have it tested against the most aggressive critics?" On the other hand, the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board said: "Pelosi's chief mistake was not also rejecting Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas, who, like Jordan, Banks and a majority of House Republicans, voted to overturn the election on the day of the insurrection. No serious investigation of the riot can be undertaken by those who shared the goals of the rioters." It added that "McCarthy and company killed an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the attack even though the Republicans' top negotiator agreed to the terms."
Some House Republicans—including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Representative Jim Jordan—said they did not watch the committee's first hearing on July 27, 2021. Representative Matthew M. Rosendale said he watched Representative Liz Cheney speak (and was "quite disappointed") but did not watch the police officers' testimony. Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik would not say whether she watched.
In late August 2021, after the committee asked telecommunications and social media companies to retain certain records, McCarthy declared that if the companies "turn over private information" to the House committee, then the companies are "in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States", and that a future Republican legislative majority will hold the companies "fully accountable". In response to McCarthy's comment, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint on September 3 with the chief counsel of the Office of Congressional Ethics. CREW noted that the subpoena was legally valid and claimed that McCarthy was illegally obstructing the investigation insofar as he was "threatening retaliation" against the telecommunications companies. Eleven House Republicans who were associated with the January 6 "Stop the Steal" rally sent a September 3 letter to thirteen telecommunications companies stating they "do not consent to the release of confidential call records or data" and threatened legal action against what they asserted were unconstitutional subpoenas.
During a September 2 television interview, McCarthy was asked about "how deeply [Trump] was involved", to which he replied that the FBI and Senate committees had found "no involvement". He and other Republicans had cited an exclusive Reuters report that unnamed current and former law enforcement officials said the FBI had found "scant evidence" of an organized plot to overturn the election. In a September 4 statement, Thompson and Cheney said the committee had queried executive branch agencies and congressional committees investigating the matter and "it's been made clear to us that reports of such a conclusion are baseless."
On October 16, The Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson criticized the committee's glacial progress, stating that "I don't believe that they're pursuing this with the degree of vigor that merits the type of targets they're talking about. We're dealing with people like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone and Ali Alexander ... They've had three months, they've done almost nothing."
Representative Scott Perry said on December 21 that he would not cooperate with the committee because, in his view, the committee itself was "illegitimate, and not duly constituted under the rules of the US House of Representatives". Similarly, on January 23, 2022, Newt Gingrich said on Fox News that he believed the committee was breaking laws, but he did not specify which laws.
On December 23, Laurence Tribe, American legal scholar and University Professor Emeritus of Constitutional Law at Harvard University, and colleagues published in The New York Times about Attorney General Merrick Garland: "Only by holding the leaders of the Jan. 6 insurrection – all of them – to account can he secure the future and teach the next generation that no one is above the law. If he has not done so already, we implore the attorney general to step up to that task."
In June 2022, Fox News announced that it would not carry live coverage of the hearings, relegating it to its sister channel Fox Business and local Fox network affiliates. Fox News instead carried special editions of Tucker Carlson Tonight and Hannity (the former notably airing commercial-free) that largely featured criticism of the hearing, with Carlson deeming it "propaganda", and lower thirds describing it as a "sham", "show trial" and "political theater". The Washington Post reported that members of the committee were given increased security due to greater threats made against them.
On December 21, a Republican-led "shadow committee" consisting of the five House members who Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy initially nominated to the official select committee released its final investigative report, which primarily focused on alleged failures of law enforcement agencies and House Democratic leaders in the lead up to the January 6 attack. The shadow committee's report accused the U.S. Capitol Police of mishandling critical intelligence in the lead-up to the attack, and placed overall blame for security failures on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership, which the report claims were "closely involved in security decisions in the lead up to and on January 6" .
In December 2022, Donald Trump responded to the committee's final report by calling the members "Marxists" and "sick people".
On February 22, 2023, Timothy Heaphy, who had served as the committee's top investigator, said he expected "indictments both in Georgia and at the federal level."
On March 8, 2023, the Republican-controlled House Administration's subcommittee on oversight opened an investigation to review the former House select committee's activities. On August 25, Representative Barry Loudermilk, who was leading the inquiry, requested that the White House provide unredacted transcripts of the committee's interviews with Secret Service agents. On March 11, 2024, the committee released a report criticizing the former House select committee's activities.
In August 2023, Trump was charged with election interference, both federally and in Georgia. Those indictments resemble the information, conclusions, and recommendations made by the House select committee. Former Representative Kinzinger said the DOJ indictment "should have come down a year ago". Representative Raskin told Axios that while the House select committee had delivered "a huge amount of factual information," the federal indictment included "several quoted statements that were definitely new to me." Representative Schiff said that these "new pieces of information" were "principally from witnesses who refused to appear before our committee".
On June 28, 2024, the Supreme Court decided in Fischer v. United States that prosecutors could validly bring an obstruction charge against someone for attempting to block the arrival of electoral certificates (which would likely apply to Trump and other high-level aides) but not simply for attempting to forcibly enter the Capitol building (as many rioters did).
Three days later, on July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court decided in Trump v. United States that all former presidents have absolute immunity for their acts as president within their constitutional purview, presumptive immunity for official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts.
On December 8, 2024, Trump said in an interview with NBC News that every member of the committee should be jailed: "Everybody on that committee … for what they did, yeah, honestly, they should go to jail". He falsely alleged the committee had "deleted and destroyed all the evidence".
On December 15, Senator Bernie Sanders told NBC that Biden should consider preemptively pardoning the committee members. Biden did so on January 20, 2025, pardoning all members and staffers as well as four police officers who testified.
Later in the day on January 20, 2025, Trump, upon taking office, granted clemency to all of the January 6 rioters. One of them, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, pardoned of seditious conspiracy and interviewed by Alex Jones the next day, urged the government to investigate Attorney General Merrick Garland (who was replaced two weeks later by Pam Bondi) as well as former U.S. attorney Matthew Graves.
On January 22, House Majority Leader Mike Johnson announced a formation of a panel to investigate the January 6 committee in what The Associated Press described as "an effort to defend Trump's actions that day and dispute the work of a bipartisan committee that investigated the siege two years ago".
On February 4, responding to a Justice Department order to identify which of its 38,000 employees had worked on the investigations of the Capitol attack, the FBI named over 5,000 employees, immediately after which the FBI Agents Association sued the Justice Department.
According to a poll conducted in July 2021 by Politico, a majority of Americans support the January 6 investigation, with 58% overall supporting and 29% opposing; 52% of Republicans polled opposed it. When Politico repeated the poll in December 2021, again, three-fifths supported the committee, including 82% of Democrats, 58% of independents, and 40% of Republicans.
In an August 2021 Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll, 58% of American voters said they thought the committee was biased, while 42% thought it was fair. In September 2021, a Pew Research poll found that only 11% of American adults said they were very confident the committee would be fair and reasonable while another 34% were somewhat confident, while a 54% majority said they were not too confident (32%) or not at all confident (22%). Confidence was highly partisan: Nearly two-thirds of Democrats and less than a quarter of Republicans said they were at least somewhat confident.
Just greater than half of Americans polled believe that Trump should face criminal charges for his role in the attack. A Washington Post–ABC News poll taken a week after the attack found 54% giving this response, and over a year later, it had not changed substantially, as 52% gave the same response to the same organization's poll conducted April 24–28, 2022. The division is partisan: five out of six Democrats support charging Trump, while five out of six Republicans oppose doing so.
NBC News found that the percentage of Americans who believe that Trump was solely or mainly responsible for the January 6 attack dropped from 52% in January 2021 to 45% in May 2022. A decrease was found within all subgroups: Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Opinions changed after the committee began public hearings. An Ipsos poll conducted June 17–18, 2022, found that 58% of Americans believe Trump is significantly responsible for the attack on the Capitol. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted June 23–27, 2022, found that 48% of Americans believe Trump should be charged with a crime.
The same Ipsos poll on June 17–18, 2022, also found that 60% of Americans believe the committee's investigation is fair and impartial. Similarly, an Economist/YouGov poll conducted June 18–21, 2022, found that 78% of Democrats, but only 15% of Republicans and 37% of independents, believe the committee's investigation is "legitimate". 78% of Democrats, but only 22% of Republicans and 41% of independents, said they "strongly" or "somewhat" approved of the committee's work.
On November 30, 2022, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy wrote a letter warning the committee that the incoming Republican-majority House of Representatives planned to investigate the committee's work.
This investigation was done in the 118th Congress by the Committee on House Administration's Subcommittee on Oversight, chaired by Representative Barry Loudermilk. On March 11, 2024, it released its "Initial Findings Report", and on December 17, 2024, it released its "Interim report on the failures and politicization of the January 6th select committee". Three weeks later, Representative Joseph Morelle, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, directly responded to Loudermilk's two-year investigation, writing that the Republicans had “failed to produce any new material findings related to Capitol security”.
On January 22, 2025, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that the 119th Congress would investigate “false narratives” about the Capitol attack. Representative Loudermilk was to lead this new subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee.
On January 2, 2025, chair Bennie Thompson and vice chair Liz Cheney were awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Joe Biden, who described them as "elected officials who served in difficult times with honor, decency, and ensure our democracy delivers".
The Committee's members were nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for their "defense of freedom and democracy."