Several House Republicans — Including James Comer — Are Open to Imprisoning January 6th Committee Members
Several House Republicans, including Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), are open to seeing their colleagues who served on the January 6th Select Committee imprisoned.
In an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker over the weekend, President-elect Donald Trump said be believed that former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney and the other members of the committee should “go to jail.”
To The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger, several Republican members of Congress expressed an openness to the idea.
“With politicians, if you’ve used a congressional committee and you’ve lied and tried to set people up and falsely imprisoned people, then you should be held accountable,” said Comer.
“If they broke the law, then they should [be imprisoned]. Now we know that they’ve manipulated evidence, so—if that’s the case, then absolutely,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN).
“It’s not looking good for them [the committee members]. You know, they’re asking for their preemptive pardon. So it kind of sounds suspect and guilty. I think anybody who has politically imprisoned American citizens and completely ruined their lives needs to be investigated,” said Lauren Boebert (R-CO).
Trump has claimed that the committee destroyed exonerating evidence — “The January 6th Unselect Committee got rid of EVERYTHING! Discarded, Deleted, Thrown Out. A Flagrant Violation of the law” — but there is no evidence to support his accusations.
Comer went on to tell Egger that “The media has been wrong on so many things. Russian collusion, the Steele Dossier, Hunter Biden laptop, no evidence of wrongdoing of Biden crime family influence peddling. The American people are sick of it and they want people held accountable.”
Still other Republicans, including flamethrowers like Troy Nehls (R-TX), expressed doubt over what Trump meant in the Welker interview.
“Well, no, see, you took that out of context,” said Nehls. “I don’t know if they should be in jail, but I think we should, I’ve always requested, we should investigate the January 6th Committee.”