This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Retiring California Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi's partisan committee that was purported to be "investigating" the events in Washington on Jan. 6, 2023, spent some $17.4 million of taxpayer money.
Their result was an evidence-edited and message-orchestrated claim that President Donald Trump somehow was at fault.
That was the day Trump held a rally for supporters, encouraging them to peacefully protest what was perceived as the faulty results of the 2020 president election.
Some went to the Capitol, some went inside and some vandalized various parts of the building.
Actually that election now is known to have been skewed by several undue influences. One was that Mark Zuckerberg handed out cash like candy to local elections officials who often used it to recruit voters in Democrat districts.
The other was the FBI's decision to try to suppress information about Biden family scandals contained in a laptop computer abandoned by Hunter Biden. A poll after the election said had those details been reported routinely, like other election issues, Biden likely would have lost.
The FBI falsely claimed at the time the information was Russian disinformation, even though agents knew the evidence was factual.
Pelosi, then speaker of the House, assembled a partisan team, refusing to seat GOP nominees. She then picked Democrats and two Trump-hating Republicans to be on the team, which ignored evidence supporting Trump and amplified claims of his responsibility, even to the point of hiring producers and others to assemble videos "dramatizing" their claims against Trump.
Now a report at the Center Square explains its investigation has confirmed while the projected budget for the committee was $9.3 million, House disbursements confirm the political scheme cost taxpayers at least $17.4 million.
U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, is on a new committee appointed by House Speaker Mike Johnson assigned to review security failures that day and confirmed the original committee "didn't spend taxpayer money properly after The Center Square told him about the final costs of the panel's investigation."
"They wasted it, wasted it," he confirmed. "That was a sham committee. (Liz) Cheney. (Adam) Kinzinger. It was a joke."
He cited Cheney, who shortly later was thrown out of her congressional office by her own voters, and Kinzinger, another Republican who decided against seeking re-election. He later took a job with a leftist network.
Dan Savickas, of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, a non-partisan nonprofit, told the Center Square the more than doubling of the budget was not appropriate.
"The median budget for a House committee is $6 million a year, so for the Jan. 6 committee to spend $17.4 million is excessive," he confirmed. "And anytime a committee is grandstanding, specifically Jan. 6, to fit a narrative instead of holding people accountable and getting the story is bad. That's why they hired documentary filmmakers."
Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat who orchestrated the committee's work, wouldn't comment, but a communications director, Yasmine Brown, said, "The work of the committee speaks for itself, and the chairman continues to stand by it."
The report explained, "An undetermined amount was spent on three dozen contractors and consultants. Many worked for a few months or less than a year, rather than all 18 months like full-time staff. They are listed in the committee's report but do not show up in a list of expenditures the U.S. House posted online disclosing its spending."
Those include a former ABC News executive, a longtime ABC producer and more.
Boasted Melinda Arons, a former Nightline employee, "I was part of the first ever team of former television journalists brought in by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol to produce the historic live hearings laying out the committee's evidence to the country."
The J6 committee hired "freelancers with backgrounds in producing and editing graphics as well as video and audio footage – prominent features of the committee's 10 nationally televised hearings from June to December 2022," the report said.
The anti-Trump conclusions from the committee later have "come into question," the report said.
"In an op-ed for Politico in January 2023, Georgetown Professor Donell Harvin, who oversaw the District of Columbia's assessment of threat intelligence, wrote that '(t)he events of Jan. 6 represented the most telegraphed and predictable attack on the homeland in history.' Further, Harvin noted that the committee devoted only 44 pages in the annexes to the security and intelligence issues, roughly 5% of the 845-page report."
