In a new interview with an outlet called The 19th, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) discussed efforts within the House of Representatives to investigate the Capitol riot — and in the process, she put Republican Congressmen including Jim Jordan of Ohio on public notice. Jordan spoke with then-President Donald Trump on the day of the Capitol riot, and there’s been talk of using the powers of the House’s riot investigation committee — which has the ability to issue subpoenas — to compel Jordan to reveal the contents of that conversation. Jordan also helped promote lies about the documented integrity of last year’s presidential election, and these lies inspired the riot.
There have been serious questions about what Trump was doing at the White House on the day of the riot. For some time, he remained relatively quiet as the violence unfolded, before eventually attempting to justify what happened by connecting it to the (non-existent) election fraud that he falsely claims was responsible for Biden’s win. In the interview with The 19th, Pelosi said that “we’ll see what the committee finds out” about Jordan and fellow Republican Congressman Jim Banks, both of whom were initially named by House GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to serve on that riot investigation committee but were rejected by Pelosi. The Speaker appears to see Jordan himself as an imminent target of the riot investigation committee.
As Pelosi put it, discussing the process of forming that committee:
‘I invited the Republicans to submit their names, which are at the approval of the Speaker. Two of them were outrageous. I mean they probably — well, we’ll see what the committee finds out about them. But they weren’t going to be on the committee. They would be antics and clowns and not serious about this, and still participants in the Big Lie. I didn’t really care if they had voted to accept the results of the election or not. All I wanted them to be is willing to see the truth… So I said three of the members were welcome to serve… but not the two, who were not serious.’
Watch Pelosi’s remarks below:
Pelosi on rejecting GOP Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks for the Jan. 6 select committee: "They would be antics and clowns and not serious about this."
"We'll see what the committee finds out about them." pic.twitter.com/nuZtxWJEKg
— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) August 16, 2021
As for Banks, he is a close ally of Trump and has claimed that Pelosi established the House’s riot investigation committee “solely to malign conservatives and to justify the Left’s authoritarian agenda,” which is obviously ridiculous but shows how his presence on the committee would have likely been defined by theatrics. At present, just two Republicans — including Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming — are on the riot investigation committee. Both were selected by Pelosi.
