➡ This podcast episode features Chris Farrell interviewing Congressman Barry Lautermilk about his role in the House Administration Committee. Lautermilk discusses the committee’s increased profile due to the 2020 security and election issues, and his efforts to increase oversight of institutions like the Library of Congress. He also talks about his investigation into the events of January 6th, including missing video evidence and discrepancies in testimonies. The congressman emphasizes the importance of truth and accountability in his work.
➡ The text discusses a situation where a large amount of digital data was examined, revealing some unique, encrypted documents. The speaker suspects these documents are politically motivated and discredits a report based on them. The speaker also mentions an attorney who was unfairly targeted and a star witness whose credibility is questioned. The text ends with discussions about financial strategies against cartels, potential legislative issues, and concerns about Ukraine’s actions towards Russia.
➡ The text discusses past actions of the Trump administration towards Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, suggesting that strength brings peace. It also mentions a possible shift in the Democrats’ approach after realizing some of their beliefs may not align with the majority of Americans. The text ends with a speculation that limiting the time in session could reduce potential issues and prepare for future actions.

I’m Chris Farrell, and this is On Watch. Welcome to On Watch, everybody. The Judicial Watch podcast where we go behind the headlines to cover news and information that the mainstream media really doesn’t want you to know about. We try to recover some lost history and explain the inexplicable. And to do all those three things today, we’re very pleased to be joined by Congressman Barry Lautermilk of the 11th District of Georgia. Welcome, Congressman Lautermilk. It’s good to be with you. Great to be with you. Thank you for taking the time to visit with us. Your district is really kind of north of Atlanta, the suburbs north of Atlanta.

And you’ve been battling away for those good constituents of yours for about 10 years coming up. That’s right. And they’ve gone back quickly. I bet you it has. 10 interesting years to be in Congress. Very interesting. You’re an Air Force veteran. I’m glad, as an Army veteran, I’m glad that you’ve had the opportunity to serve your country. Also, as a Cold Warrior like myself. That’s right. You serve on two committees. House administration, which sounds really boring. That’s a dull title. It isn’t foreign affairs, and it isn’t, you know, Homeland Security. House administration, but actually, it’s kind of a misnomer.

There’s a lot more to house administration. You’re not going around assigning offices. House administration, tell me some of the big achievements you’ve been able to get your arms around in that committee. Well, this is the first time that house administration has had an oversight subcommittee. I’ve been on house administration for three terms. I’m the longest serving member on house administration out of both parties. And what you described as house administration being boring has been, in recent past, kind of what it is. I mean, we have oversight over the Library of Congress, Smithsonian’s, the operations of the House floor, security of the Capitol, as well as federal elections.

And until 2020, it was really not a high profile committee, but when security of the Capitol and elections were the highlight of 2020, it kind of changed the profile of the committee. And I’ve been an advocate for having more oversight, because there’s oversight that we need to do of the Government Printing Office of the Library of Congress, who have really, in years, they have tried to, for lack of a better term, separate themselves from Congress. They want to be the Library of the Country, not the Library of Congress. And I fought back on that.

So our issue set is constrained to Capitol Hill, but it’s broad in our oversight capability. When Kevin McCarthy became Speaker, he approached me about taking on chairing the first-ever oversight subcommittee of house administration with the core purpose of investigating what really happened on January 6th and how the Capitol was breached. I mean, regardless of who did it, how in the world could that ever happen? And I told him I would be glad to do that. I’d be honored to do it under two conditions. One, that I’m given the resources to actually do the job properly, and two, that I am not constrained by any political ideas, that I just get to the truth.

And whatever the truth is, that’s what we report to the American people. And he agreed to both of those. Those are two good fundamental principles, because really, as you mentioned in your lead-in, you have oversight authority of the Capitol Police, which would seem to be pivotal. And full disclosure, Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit on behalf of the estate of Ashley Babbitt, the only homicide, the only murder that day, by Capitol Police officer, then lieutenant, now promoted to captain, unbelievably. Bird, it should give his last name. So, you wanted to go and look back at January 6th and figure out, okay, what happened, what didn’t happen, and find some kind of accountability.

Tell me what you did, what you found out. Well, the first thing we did is acquired what we thought or what should have been all of the records of the Select Committee. If you remember that Pelosi created the Select, supposed to be bipartisan committee to investigate what happened on January 6th. But she took an unprecedented move, and she vetoed the Republican nominees. Now, whenever these committees are created, the Democrats get a certain number of appointments, and then the minority leader, who at the time was Kevin McCarthy, for the Republicans, gets to appoint ours.

Well, she didn’t like who he appointed, which raises a red flag to start with, because the purpose of having a bipartisan is you have a majority and then a minority who issues a minority report, and who can counter any politicization of the committee or the facts, right? So, she vetoed those, and then she appointed, well, she had already appointed Liz Cheney, who was in the Republican conference, as a Democrat appointee. But she actually used one of her Democrat appointments to appoint her to the committee and then named her Vice Chair.

And then later on, appointed Adam Kinzinger. Both were, they hated Donald Trump. Both have made very disparaging remarks about him, and both had already accused him of being the impetus behind what happened on January 6th without evidence. That fit the bill for what she wanted in that committee. So, we walked in, and under House rules, whenever you run an investigation or oversight, there are records that you have to keep. And so, Kevin McCarthy sent a preservation letter to the select committee saying, preserve all of your documents. And so, within the first month or so, we acquired the documents, and our first job was to go in and see what we had.

And it was a couple million printed pages and five hard drives of data. So, we spent several months trying to figure out what we had. And we started realizing maybe there’s some things missing. And then I got a phone call from Stephan Passantino, who said, look, I represented Cassidy Hutchinson. So, he’s an outside attorney. He’s an outside attorney. Representing, for at least a time, Cassidy Hutchinson, who’s a young lady who worked in the White House, who made some rather outrageous claims. Very outrageous claims. Now, he represented her for her first three depositions. It was her fourth deposition where she came in and changed her story.

So, we were very interested because apparently, each year they’re lied in the beginning or lied later. We started finding some information. For instance, we found an errata sheet, which is normally done after a deposition, right, to where you make technical changes. Like, if I wanted to talk about Brian, but I actually called him Barry, then you can go back and change that. Well, she had a errata sheet for her first three depositions of 14 pages long that was changing substance of her testimony. Basically, this was her cover, right? Well, we’re changing the first three, so she’s not purging herself.

Well, anyhow, they had decided that they needed a reason why she had changed her story. So, Liz Cheney, as we have recently revealed, was back channeling with Cassidy Hutchinson during this time period, had Cassidy fire Stefan as her attorney, and then Liz helped her get a new attorney. And that was between her massive change in stories, so Stefan is defending himself because what they did is accused him of telling her she needed to lie, to protect the Trump team, and he never did that. Well, he’s trying to defend himself because they filed ethics complaints against him with a bar in Georgia and a bar in…

They try to destroy the guys professionally, right? It’s destroy him. So, he calls me and he says, look, all I want is the videotapes of our depositions because all I have to do is show that videotape and it’ll prove they’re lying. Watch the video, exactly. And I’m like, no problem. We’ll go look for it. And we couldn’t find it. Not only could we not find that, we could not find any videotapes of any depositions, which it was known they have videotaped all of them. Then we started picking up on other little pieces of evidence.

We found a letter to where the chair, Benny Thompson, was sending House documents to the White House for them to keep. Now, these were transcribed interviews and depositions of White House employees that worked with Donald Trump. And so, then we started realizing we don’t have any of the transcribed interviews or depositions of any of the secret service agents. So, one piece led to another and we started finding there’s a lot of information we don’t have. So, I wrote the chairman, Benny Thompson, a letter saying basically, where are these videos? Where is this other information? And he responded basically saying, you don’t need the videos that because you already have the printed copies of their transcriptions.

And it’s just the opposite because the video is what counts. Exactly. Because reading dry text does not give you… Well, it’s like one of the members of our subcommittee, who’s an attorney, he said, look, Barry, there’s a lot of difference between you saying, I shot the clerk versus I shot the clerk. You know, there’s a big difference there. There’s a world of difference. So, that’s when we started realizing we’re missing information. In his response to me, Benny Thompson said, well, I gave you all this information, which some of it wasn’t there. But I also gave you four and a half terabytes of digital data.

Well, we only had about two terabytes. So, he’s telling us, I gave over four and a half, we only have two, so we hired an outside forensics company to come in and do a low level scrub of the hard drives. We found 10,000 deleted documents on it. I know that sounds like a lot, but some of it was just duplicates of what we already had digitally. But there were about 120 documents that were unique. Substantive. Well, we don’t know because they were all password encrypted and no one seems to know what the password is.

Well, when you look at it, if you want to… And we did recover some documents that we didn’t have. So, there were some unique documents that we were able to get out of that. But if you think about it, if you wanted to keep us from getting the documents, you just delete them, right? Which we were able to recover some. The fact that they were password protected meant they were trying to keep people on the committee from getting to them. You know, this was just for a select few. We still don’t know exactly what those are.

I assume they’re probably exhibits from some of the White House and Secret Service depositions. We haven’t been able to get some of the exhibits from there. But at this point, I think we found enough information to totally discredit the work that they did that it was totally politically motivated and there wasn’t an ounce of truth to 90% of their report. And for those viewers and listeners that want to do a really deep dive on this beyond what Congressman Laddermilk has just talked about, but from another perspective, from the perspective of an attorney, try to do the right thing.

And that is Stefan Passantino. Our good friend Tucker Carlson has done like a two hour interview with him. And he can go, I feel bad for the guy because what they put him through, trying to destroy him professionally, trying to destroy him, even I guess, you know, just smear the guys in ways that destroy his life for their convenience. And so it’s not just corrupt with Benny Thompson and Liz Cheney and the rest of them. It’s corrupt in the sense of trying to destroy an attorney who was just trying to provide guidance, provide legal counsel, which everyone’s entitled to, except if you’re on the wrong side, then they get to destroy you.

And I encourage people to watch that because Stefan does an excellent job of laying out everything that they did because, and it really applies to a whole lot of the entirety of the Select Committee’s report because Cassidy was their star witness. They built everything off of her. And the whole thing was a lie. And it was. And he does a great job of laying it out of how they orchestrated this once they got her to come up with these stories, which, you know, that Donald Trump attacked the Secret Service agent and tried to take control of the beast, right? Well, you would think if, in my investigation, if somebody came with that sensation of the story, and we’ve had pretty close, I’ll hold onto that till I can corroborate it.

That would have been very easy for Liz Cheney to call Secret Service and have them come in. Well, she did do that in November after Cassidy testified in June after the midterm elections. They finally called the Secret Service agent and get this. When they finally interviewed him, they never asked him about that incident. Of course, that he had to interject it on his own and they tried to stop him from saying anything. So she was their star witness. They didn’t want anything to disrupt that because they built their entire report off of her saying that Donald Trump was crazy.

He orchestrated this. He was happy when people were wanting to hang Mike Pence. All of this was discredited by these interviews they did with the White House personnel and Department of Homeland Security personnel, which now makes it clear to me that’s why those documents weren’t kept. And to your credit, you led the charge on getting this, recovering this information and writing a report that exposes and explains all this. Exactly. And we’ll be coming out with another report sometime in the middle of December. Good. To your credit, another committee is sitting on its financial services.

I just want you to touch on briefly. We don’t have a whole lot of time. But there’s things that could be done, in my opinion, to further squeeze cartels financially. They live and breathe with the movement of money. And I think sometimes we kind of leave some of the tools on the table and don’t really – so give our viewers and listeners just a little hint of some things that could be done to really aggressively attack cartels on financial services. Right. Well, and one thing is because they run and operate out of Mexico, it limits what we can do except for when they come over.

They do work with people within the United States. Of course, through intelligence, we can find out who those are, and we can put financial squeezes on them. But what I think that the most appropriate approach is – and I think you may see this out of this administration – is putting pressure on Mexico to clean it up, to provide us with information, to start putting the squeeze on these guys. And then we can use a series of sanctions and restricting money flow that goes to the cartels. Things that we’ve talked about doing, sit on the National Security Subcommittee on Financial Services, things that we’ve looked at doing, but you just couldn’t get participation with the White House.

I think you’re going to see a different scenario now. So we will begin working with the White House as soon as we populate the committee. It’ll be a new committee coming in, new chairman. And we’ll start to – you get one shot at this stuff, right? I mean, we only have the House for two years that we know about. And that two years is going to go back quickly, especially in legislative terms, right? Because it takes so much time to get legislation through. Is working with the White House now to come up with what do we want this to look like? What tools do we need to hand the administration, the Department of Treasury, the Fed, what do they need to be able to go after these cartels? Now, we know the tools are there, because this administration has used those tools effectively against American citizens.

FinCEN can watch what you’re doing. Exactly. And so they know how to spy on Americans. We need to turn that tide over, and you need to spy on those that are harming Americans. And so these Mexican drug cartel guys who have vacation homes in Spain and France, you can go to Spain and France and say, we’re not amused. I need you to turn it off. I mean, additional pressure could be applied. Look at what this administration did to Russian oligarchs. That’s exactly what has happened. But they have been unwilling to do that same thing.

The sanctions and capturing their assets and putting restrictions on their assets, they readily did it to the Russian oligarchs. And as a product of the Cold War, I don’t have a problem with that. No, not at all. But you need to do it for those who are having a direct impact on the health and welfare of Americans, especially our children. They’re killing Americans every day. A couple of last-minute points here. We got a lame duck Congress now until we hit the inauguration and a new Congress being constituted. What are some dangers or concerns that you’re worried about? The biggest issue that we’re going to be facing at this point legislatively is going to be funding.

And we still haven’t funded the government. It’s status quo all over again. That we need to just be careful of what we do going forward. Now, more than likely, you’re going to see a short-term CR. I think this is what President Trump is going to look for. Just something to get us beyond January 20th so then we can put his priorities in place. Yeah, he’s going to hit this, I think, like a thunderbolt. I think he’s going to come out of the gate very aggressively, and people should put on their seatbelts because I think that there’s going to be some – I mean, he signaled all sorts of things, but I think it’s going to be even more profound than people realize.

I’m very concerned about Ukraine firing off long-range attack on missiles into Russia. Open-ended question. What’s your take on the danger associated with that? Well, I want to know the purpose for doing it at this point. I think it’s politically motivated. I don’t see how you can get around that. I think the perception is that Trump is going to – the Democrat perception is Trump’s going to walk away from Ukraine, and he’s never said that. He said he’s going to bring an end to the war, right? Right. And if you go back into the Trump administration, when Russia’s been attacking Ukraine for a long time, right? They took the Umbask region after taking Crimea.

Obama’s response was to send blankets to Ukraine, right? Trump came in, and he sent missiles. Correct. And it helped stop the aggression going on. So if you go back and you look at Trump’s history, it’s not going to be the acquiesce. It’s going to, say, show strength, and that’s what gets us peace. The only thing I could see is that possibly they’re trying to escalate things to the point to make it more difficult. You talk about the dangers of lame duck. It’s retribution from those who didn’t win. I was cautiously optimistic that there are many on the Democrat side that are saying, obviously, we are out of step with the American people.

So we need to take this time to rethink where we are. I think some of them are scratching the head thing. You know, I really thought that 80 percent of Americans wanted children to be able to transition to another gender, whether their parents wanted it or not. We thought 80 percent of Americans wanted males to play women’s sports. And when the election came in, they’re now, at least the ones that have some common sense are saying, maybe we were off base. And we believed our own lies. I think there are some in the Democrats that are taking that approach.

We’re hearing about it. But others, I think, are looking at, you know, what can we do to make a final shot? Right. And so one thing I think you may see is limiting our time that we’re here. If we can get some funding done, they probably kick us out of town for a while because we can do less mischief here and get everybody ready to come back. The Republicans are safe when you’re out of session. That’s right. Mr. Congressman, thank you so much for coming in and joining us. We really appreciate it.

Fascinating talk. We’ll have you back again sometime. I’d love to. That’s great. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. I’m Chris Farrell. On watch. [tr:trw].

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