Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is not an attorney.
But you might have thought that he was with the way he baited Jan. 6 Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and then reeled in the hook. He had some fascinating questions, and when you see where he's going with it, it's a pretty epic video. The questions he asks are pretty important. He upsets the apple chart as to the facts on the deleted Secret Service texts from Jan. 6 and exposes the Committee's failures on the pipe bomb question.
Massie said the texts were deleted after the preservation requests from Congress and so he considered it a violation of the Federal Records Act. He pointed to a statement that he entered into the record where Thompson and Liz Cheney said such a thing would violate the Act. Thompson agreed he thought it would be a violation.
That's when Massie dropped the hammer on Thompson. He said that the excuse given for the deletion was that the material was wiped out during the migration of the phones. But as he points out, at least some of that migration was still happening on February 26, 2021, under DHS head Alejandro Mayorkas, in February. Whoops.
Massie later posted the documents he referenced in the hearing.
Then he explained why he was very invested in the matter of the pipe bombs that were left at the DNC and the RNC. He said that the government claimed that these were viable bombs (despite the fact they had been planted the night before and had kitchen timers that could only be set for an hour on them). Kamala Harris was at the DNC at the time of the discovery of the DNC bomb. But if you look at the video he was able to get of the front of the DNC, when a Capitol Police officer who was not in uniform informed Kamala Harris' Secret Service detail, there doesn't seem to be a quick reaction. He knows because of the video and because he also spoke to the Capitol Police. In fact, he said it took ten minutes to get Harris out of the building. We reported on that video and some of the big questions.
Given the threat to Harris and the question of the pipe bombs, Massie noted, one would think you'd want to follow up on the question of the Secret Service texts. But he said it seemed neither the Committee nor Mayorkas seemed to have been interested. He also was incredulous that Thompson didn't know Harris had been at the DNC, nor had he seen the video Massie was talking about. That is incredibly troubling since this was the Committee who supposedly was looking into the facts but he seemed completely clueless about such critical points. But if it didn't serve their political purpose to go after former President Donald Trump, it seems they weren't interested in it. Massie implied that had it been up to him, he might have pursued Mayorkas for obstruction on impeachment charges.