NYT: Republicans ‘Decided Not to Participate’ in January 6 Committee

The New York Times claims Tuesday that Republicans “decided not to participate” in the January 6 Committee in the U.S. House, ignoring the fact that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rejected Republican nominees to the committee.

The text of the enabling resolution behind the committee, H.Res. 503, requires that the committee be composed of thirteen members, five of whom “shall” be appointed after consultation with the Minority Leader, i.e. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).

As the Times itself reported last August, Pelosi took the unprecedented step of rejecting two of McCarthy’s five nominees, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Jim Banks (R-IN), whereupon McCarthy said that Republicans would no longer participate:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved on Wednesday to bar two of former President Donald J. Trump’s most vociferous Republican defenders in Congress from joining a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, saying their conduct suggested they could not be trusted to participate.

In an unusual move, Ms. Pelosi announced that she was rejecting Representatives Jim Banks of Indiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio, both of whom amplified Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud, joined their party’s efforts to challenge President Biden’s victory on Jan. 6 and have opposed efforts to investigate the assault on the Capitolby Trump supporters. She agreed to seat the other three Republicans who had been chosen for the panel.

…

The speaker’s decision drew an angry response from Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, who announced that Republicans would boycott the panel altogether. He seized on Ms. Pelosi’s intervention as confirmation of his charge that the investigation was nothing more than a political exercise to hurt the G.O.P.

Now, the Times reports that Republicans simply chose to boycott the panel, ignoring Pelosi’s move to block GOP members. The Times casts that in a positive light, saying the lack of opposition allows the panel’s secretive investigation to operate:

The panel’s investigators have not been slowed by the partisan infighting that sometimes takes place among committee staff on other congressional panels. Because Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, decided Republicans would not participate in the panel, there are no staff members in the interviews running interference for Mr. Trump.

Several lawsuits against the panel note that Pelosi’s exclusion of Republican members — aside from the only two who would participate, due to their hatred of Trump — violate H.Res. 503 and therefore invalidate the panel’s subpoenas and activities.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.