In January of 2023, Speaker Kevin McCarthy asked Representative Barry Loudermilk, Chairman of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, to investigate the security failures at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as well as the actions, investigation, and subsequent report of the Pelosi-appointed Select Committee on January 6. The result was the “Interim Report on the Failures and Politicization of the January 6th Select Committee”, also known as the 2nd January 6th Report, published on December 17, 2024.
Promising a report free of bias, Loudermilk was critical of the bias of the Select Committee’s report, as is probably evident in the title of his own. I found these two paragraphs noteworthy:
“The Select Committee’s unwritten purpose was to prevent President Trump from seeking reelection in 2024. It was no secret that, after Speaker Pelosi failed to secure a conviction in the Senate for the second time, the only way to guarantee that President Trump could not return to office would be if he was found to have ‘engaged in an insurrection or rebellion against’ the Constitution of the United States in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. 17 This idea was published in major newspapers within days of January 6 and spoken about frequently in Left-wing circles. 18 Speaker Pelosi knew that the best pathway to stop President Trump from returning to the White House was if the Select Committee could craft a narrative compelling enough to convince the Department of Justice and the judicial system, along with the American public, that President Trump was an “insurrectionist.”
“House Resolution 503 mandated that the Select Committee investigate the ‘facts, circumstances, and causes’ of January 6, and the ‘preparedness and response’ of law enforcement. 19 Instead, as evidenced by the Select Committee’s Final Report, it deployed its vast resources to attempt to prevent President Trump from returning to the White House. H. Res. 503’s mandate does not mention an investigation of President Trump, but the Select Committee still managed to include President Trump’s name more than 1,900 times in its final report.”
Among others who used the same term, Senator Mitch McConnell called the attack on the Capitol an insurrection, in a February 2025 interview with Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes”. The Select Committee’s report is arguably repetitious, but there is no mystery why Donald Trump would be mentioned over and over again in a report on January 6th, for which he was the prime mover and which was the culmination of his month’s long mission to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to the winner of the 2020 election.
The Interim Report produced these eight Findings:
FINDING 1: President Trump did not attack his Secret Service detail at any time on January 6.
FINDING 2: There was no pre-planned off-the-record move to the Capitol in the days leading up to January 6.
FINDING 3: There is no evidence that President Trump agreed with rioters chanting “hang Mike Pence.”
FINDING 4: Cassidy Hutchinson falsely claimed to have drafted a handwritten note for President Trump on January 6.
FINDING 5: President Trump did not have intelligence indicating violence on the morning of January 6.
FINDING 6: Cassidy Hutchinson lied about the classification status of documents to disparage Mark Meadows.
FINDING 7: Representative Cheney and Cassidy Hutchinson attempted to disbar Stefan Passantino.
FINDING 8: Cassidy Hutchinson misrepresented President Trump’s actions at Lafayette Square Park in the summer of 2020.
Regarding Finding 1, Cassidy Hutchinson was clear that she was reporting a conversation she had with Tony Ornato about an incident which had just happened but which neither of them witnessed, but with one person who did, the man Trump allegedly assaulted, Bobby Engel, sitting next to Ornato at the time. In Hutchinson’s telling, Engel neither looked up nor disputed Ornato’s account.
As I noted in the introduction to my highlighted excerpts from Hutchinson’s book (https://trumptimes.blog/2025/12/28/excerpts-from-enough-by-cassidy-hutchinson-revised-and-expanded/), The close working relationship and friendship between Hutchinson and Tony Ornato is important, given Ornato’s denial of having told Hutchinson any such story. In what Ornato would explain was planned months in advance, he resigned from the Secret Service two months after that testimony.
The rest of us are left to ponder what motive Hutchinson would have to invent a conversation to portray the president as out of control and threatening to Secret Service agent Bobby Engel, as opposed to what motive Ornato and Engel would have to deny it. In any case, Hutchinson repeated the alleged episode in her book a year later, along with a subsequent reference to the incident Ornato made in jest not long afterward.
For whatever reason Ornato denied the story, it is relevant that elsewhere he made some highly questionable statements to the Select Committee, to the effect that he did not recall any specific intelligence about the possibility of violence on January 6, except regarding a possible clash between Trump’s supporters and opponents at the Washington Monument. In his capacity as deputy chief of staff and assistant director of the Secret Service, he would have been responsible for briefing the chief of staff and the president on such matters. And there was no shortage of intelligence on potential violence at the Capitol that day or the preceding days (see pages 127-128 of the Executive Summary, below). This is clear from the January 6th Report and Hutchinson’s book. Many of us likely recall warnings in the media.
Regarding Finding 2, there was talk in the West Wing of Trump going to the Capitol on January 6, and much concern among White House lawyers and other staff members the morning of, as Hutchinson relates in her book. Kevin McCarthy had tried to discourage such a move.
Regarding Finding 3, Trump was certainly aware that rioters were chanting “Hang Mike Pence”, and if he was not aware of it before his 2:24 tweet egging on rioters angry with Pence, he made no retraction of that tweet.
Regarding Finding 4, the Interim Report’s conclusion that Eric Herschmann penned the words on the notecard is no slam-dunk, and it is not a matter of much importance whose memory is mistaken, Hutchinson’s or Herschmann’s. The latter was, by the way, in both Hutchinson’s book and the January 6th Report, a consistently level head, as were other White House lawyers.
(The sample of Hutchinson’s handwriting which the report produces is a birthday card she wrote to a friend, in which her cursive script is painstakingly deliberate. The script on the note card is obviously hurried–in caps–as there was no time to lose.)
Regarding Finding 5, it is simply not a believable statement. There is no way Trump was unaware of the intelligence indicating possible violence, and he knew that many of his supporters at the Ellipse rally were armed.
Regarding Finding 6, whatever the status of the documents and the appropriateness of their release to media persons, the Subcommittee somewhat undermines its conclusion that Hutchinson lied with this statement in the report: “The most likely explanation for Hutchinson’s erroneous recollection is that she was ignorant to the facts underlying the classification status of the Crossfire Hurricane documents, and she allowed her perception of the situation to convince her that what she perceived to be true about the documents was, in fact, the truth. The Subcommittee was unable to interview Hutchinson and therefore it was unable to identify how many other times Hutchinson in fact testified to events based on her limited, erroneous perception in her sworn testimony.”
Regarding Finding 7, True or not, Stefan Passantino, being a lawyer from Trump World, impressed Hutchinson as more concerned with protecting Trump than her telling the truth and nothing but the truth. He told her that “I don’t recall” [true or not, presumably] is not perjury, and that the Select Committee members could not know whether she remembered something or not.
Regarding Finding 8, the Interim Report states: “Cassidy Hutchinson alleged that President Trump ordered law enforcement to clear Lafayette Square Park of protesters. In her words, ‘the majority of whom were exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.’” The Subcommittee concluded that Hutchinson was downplaying the violence in Lafayette Square Park, portraying Trump’s response as excessive. According to journalist Bob Woodward, Trump wanted “a law-and-order crackdown–10,000 active-duty regular troops in the city. He asked about the Insurrection Act…” Trump wanted the 82nd Airborne from Fort Bragg to deploy in Washington, which Attorney General William Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, all thought was unnecessary, and resisted. (See Woodward’s account in Peril, pp.89-98.)
With the Interim Report, Congressman Loudermilk has come a long way since the Capitol riot, as have many of his colleagues. In the midst of that riot he had this text exchange with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows:
Representative Barry Loudermilk, 2:44 p.m.: “It’s really bad up here on the hill.” “They have breached the Capitol.”232 At 2:48 p.m., Meadows responded: “POTUS is engaging.”233 At 2:49 p.m., Loudermilk responded: “Thanks. This doesn’t help our cause.”234
The House Republicans’ fidelity to Trump was on display yesterday at the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing with special counsel Jack Smith. Chairman Jim Jordan was particularly loyal with his assertion that “everyone knows” Cassidy Hutchinson made the story up about Trump lunging for the steering wheel and then at Bobby Engel in the “beast”, the president’s SUV, following his speech at the Ellipse on January 6. Jordan inferred from Jack Smith’s hesitancy regarding her account that it was not credible, but that was most likely a misreading of Smith’s concerns. It is specifically the fact that her account was second or third hand that rendered it of questionable value to a prosecution, especially when two eye-witnesses, Bobby Engel and the driver, denied it. As I explained above, there is good reason to doubt other parts of Ornato’s testimony before the Select Committee, and it is hard to imagine why Hutchinson would invent a story that reflected poorly on the president, knowing full well how Trump World treats defectors, even when they tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Her portrayal of Trump was damning enough without the beast story.
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