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... A new House panel will re-investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack with an eye toward recasting the narrative about the events in Washington that day.
It's the latest sign that the deadly riot remains a wound on Congress that might never fully heal amid ferocious partisan sparring. Retribution, not reconciliation, appears to be the prime motivation behind the new probe, with the Republicans behind it still bitter over the work of the panel's previous iteration, which was largely led by Democrats and concluded President Donald Trump was singularly to blame for the violence inflicted by his supporters.
One GOP member of the new panel, Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins, did not rule out questioning members of the prior committee.
"They were not invested in actual investigative work anyway," said Higgins, who has pushed an unfounded theory that FBI agents helped coordinate the events at the Capitol. "That thing was never legitimate. It was always biased. And therefore, if we question them, it may be with the angle of having them implicate themselves in lies that they presented as truth."
Speaker Mike Johnson called it "a committee investigating the previous committee" in a CNN interview Sunday and said the prior effort "was rigged."
The panel's chair, Georgia Rep. Barry Loudermilk, describes the investigation more soberly. He said in an interview that GOP staff have been quietly toiling for months, even before Johnson moved to formalize the probe this month.
Loudermilk said his team has been "talking to different entities," reviewing documents and brainstorming potential investigative targets.
"We need to look at it from a factual standpoint," he said. "It's dangerous out there. There were a lot of civilians, as well as members of Congress and staff and even press that were here on Jan. 6. And I think we're all interested to know, why did the Capitol get breached " regardless of who did it " how did it get breached?" ...
