A House subcommittee chairman says that a former congresswoman, Liz Cheney, a Republican who was vice chairwoman of the January 6 committee, should face criminal charges for witness tampering. Congressman Barry Loudermilk says Ms. Cheney personally “colluded” with a star witness  to procure false testimony damaging to President-elect Trump. 

Mr. Loudermilk has spent two years investigating the security failures at the Capitol on January 6 and the conduct of the committee that investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The findings from Mr. Loudermilk were compiled in the “Interim Report on the Failures and Politicization of the January 6th Select Committee,” which was released on Tuesday afternoon.

He issued the report from his perch atop the House Administration Committee’s subcommittee on oversight. How an investigation or prosecution of Ms. Cheney would comport with the Speech and Debate Clause of the Constitution is unclear. The clause holds that in respect of Senators and Representatives “for any Speech or Debate in either House they shall not be questioned in any other Place.” It is one of the most important immunities from prosecution granted in the Constitution.

In a letter detailing his findings, Mr. Loudermilk said he faced strong headwinds from those he was seeking to investigate, including “missing and deleted documents, hidden evidence, unaccounted for video footage, and uncooperative bureaucrats.”

“This report reveals that there was not just one single cause for what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6; but it was a series of intelligence, security, and leadership failures at several levels and numerous entities,” he says. “The failures, coverups and false accusations in the aftermath of January 6 have only increased the people’s distrust of Washington D.C. I hope the work of this subcommittee will help restore a level of hope in our government; but, until we hold accountable those responsible, and reform our institutions, we will not fully regain trust.”

Ms. Cheney, a fierce opponent of Trump despite her deeply conservative bona fides, was removed from her position in the Republican leadership and then successfully primaried in Wyoming, where she was the sparsely populated state’s sole representative. Following her ouster from the House, Ms. Cheney campaigned for Vice President Harris. 

Mr. Loudermilk argues that Ms. Cheney should face criminal charges for allegedly collaborating with Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s third chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and with  former White House communications director, Alyssa Farah Griffin. 

Mr. Loudermilk alleges — based on text messages he obtained between Ms. Hutchinson and Ms. Griffin — that Ms. Hutchinson agreed to concoct a sensational story about President Trump grabbing the steering wheel of his official vehicle from a Secret Service driver as he sought to join demonstrators at the Capitol on  January 6, 2021. 

“Representative Cheney’s influence on Hutchinson is apparent from that point forward by her dramatic change in testimony and eventual claims against President Trump using second- and thirdhand accounts. For example, Hutchinson claimed that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato (“Ornato”) told her that Trump lunged towards the driver of his car after Trump’s request to go to the Capitol was denied,” Mr. Loudermilk says. “This story has never been corroborated and was directly refuted by both United States Secret Service (“USSS”) agents in the vehicle with President Trump that day, and Ornato himself.”

Mr. Loudermilk drew on Ms. Hutchinson’s and Ms. Cheney’s respective memoirs, both of which were published after the January 6 Committee concluded its work. In a passage in Ms. Hutchinson’s book, she states that Ms. Cheney provided her with a list of amenable lawyers she could hire after her original counsel was fired because Ms. Hutchinson claimed she was not being represented well. In her memoir, Ms. Cheney says she never provided any advice to Ms. Hutchinson on legal matters, as it would be unethical for a committee member to give legal advice to witnesses. 

The oversight subcommittee has hinged much of their probe into the January 6 Committee on the fact that Ms. Cheney’s select committee had deleted files so that they could not be turned over to the new House Republican majority in 2023. 

On December 28, 2022 — just days before the GOP took the House majority — more than one terabyte of data was allegedly archived and deleted from the January 6 Committee’s files, according to Mr. Loudermilk. 

“It is unclear what files were excluded, but it is clear that the Select Committee instructed its e- discovery contractor to proactively remove certain files from the archive it prepared and subsequently turned over to the Subcommittee,” the subcommittee writes.