Last night, Rachel Maddow welcomed Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the select committee on Jan. 1, to talk about the record requests the committee made yesterday.
"Mr. Chairman, I have to ask you about one thing that I noticed, looking at all the different requests to these agencies, the different categories of information that you're looking for," Maddow said.
"I noticed some different timelines. In a lot of instances, you're asking for information about a ton of different people and a ton of different things they were doing, but the time frame is really narrow. It's just on January 6th itself. For other categories of information, though, you're asking for different time frames. The time period between November 3rd, for example, and the january 6th attack and the inauguration.
"In some cases, you're asking for information going all the way back specifically to April 2020. Requests for information about basically planning to try to undermine election results, going back as far as April 2020. I just have to ask you, what was going on as far back as April 2020 that you want records from that early?"
"Well, we have information that I can't share with you at this point that individuals were planning in anticipation of the election not going their way and by getting access to this information, we'll be able to prove it. Clearly the things we cited in our letter kind of lay out the predicate for what occurred. 'If this happened, we'll do this. If this happened, we'll do something else.' So there was always a plan A, B, C, S in this process. And so there were a lot of people involved," Thompson said.
"We want to find out from the people who took out the permits for January 6th, the march. We want to make sure that those individuals who financed individuals coming here, that we talk to them. There are a lot of information that we will need and that's why we did a significant wide net casting effort with this first letter, which I anticipate, to be very honest with you, there will be some other letters forthcoming also, because we need access to all the available information.
"Because, you know, when the president of the United States invites people to come on a particular day and in that invitation says, 'It's going to be wild,' that causes the committee and a lot of other patriotic Americans real concern, because in America, we're supposed to settle our differences at the ballot box. Not with an insurrection or anything like that. We are not a tin horn dictatorship, we're the United States of America."
