WASHINGTON – Committee on House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight Chairman Barry Loudermilk (GA-11) delivered opening remarks at today’s subcommittee hearing entitled, “Oversight of United States Capitol Security: Assessing Security Failures on January 6, 2021.”
Subcommittee Chairman Loudermilk’s Opening Remarks:
“Today we are focused on identifying the numerous security failures that proceeded, and continue to persist, following the breach of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Although it has been more than two years, there are still many unanswered questions.
Former Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats spent millions of dollars on their weaponized Select Committee to Investigate January 6, yet the Committee failed to investigate the very real security failures.
Today, we are joined by Chief Steven Sund, who was Chief of the United States Capitol Police on that day.
The Democrat’s Select Committee never invited Chief Sund to testify during one of their prime-time hearings despite him being the Chief of Police on January 6.
Perhaps that is because his testimony didn’t fit with their preconceived narrative.
For months leading up to January 6, House Democrats championed the anti-police “defund the police” narrative.
House Democrats continued pushing this dangerous narrative throughout the appropriations process where they threatened to cut the Capitol Police’s budget.
This politicization of the Capitol Police directly contributed to the many structural and procedural failures we witnessed that day.
Let me be clear: I stand with law enforcement, specifically our Capitol Police officers, and appreciate their dedication, bravery, and service.
I hope my Democratic colleagues do the same.
We now know that serious structural failures within the Capitol Police Intelligence Department contributed to the terrible events of that day.
This includes misplaced and misguided goals, as well as key intelligence failures that resulted in timely warnings not reaching Capitol Police leadership.
And instead of doing a comprehensive assessment of these intelligence failures, Chief Sund was pushed out, and the new leadership silenced individuals who spoke out about these failures.
Retaliation against whistleblowers is unacceptable. This is one of the reasons House Republicans are conducting this investigation.
I look forward to hearing Chief Sund’s view regarding the multiple accusations of retaliation that are now public.
I also look forward to hearing directly from Chief Sund about the general operations of Capitol Police, including day-to-day relations with the Capitol Police Board as well as the Speaker of the House.
Chief Sund’s testimony today will provide transparency, accountability, and most importantly, help to prevent anything like this from happening again.
Finally, we will focus on the aftermath of January 6, and the ensuing witch-hunt conducted by the Select Committee on January 6th – of which I was unfortunately a target.
Throughout their nearly 2 years of “work”, the Select Committee clearly operated on hearsay and cherry-picked so-called evidence to fit into their desired narrative.
When the Select Committee published their final report in December of 2022, it was clear that their multimillion-dollar Committee effort was a political weapon focused on attacking former President Trump and his supporters, instead of how to prevent another incident.
We must ask ourselves why the Capitol was ill-prepared and what security changes are needed to ensure adequate Capitol security – a question the January 6 Select Committee failed to scrutinize.
This was preventable, and we must ensure nothing like that ever happens again.”
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