In the days before Republicans took control of the House last year, Democrats deleted more than 100 encrypted files relating to the investigation of the Jan 6 events which, as we now know, were four parts peaceful protest, one part riot, and two parts FBI-sponsored Capitol Hill tourism.
The House Administration Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), was supposed to receive about four terabytes of data from the outgoing Democrats but was given only about half that much. All in all, 117 files were deleted, according to a House digital forensics examination seen by Fox News.
To give you an idea of how much data that is, two terabytes of hard drive space can store about 500 feature-length movies in 1080p high definition with 5.1 multichannel sound.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) chaired the subcommittee when Democrats held the House before January 2023 and Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was still Speaker. Thompson was required to turn over all documents relating to the Democrats’ Jan 6 investigation but, according to a letter sent to him by Loudermilk, Thompson “claimed to have ‘turned over 4-terabytes of digital files,’ but the hard drives archived by the Select Committee with the Clerk of the House contain less than 3-terabytes of data.”
Sources told Fox that the files were deleted on Jan. 1 of last year, “just days before Thompson’s team was required to transfer the data to the new committee.”
All 117 files were recovered by the forensics team, but there’s a catch.