The new January 6 subcommittee of the House Judicial Committee has turned its focus on the paid informants who were in attendance that day and whether they properly shared intelligence with law enforcement before and during the day's events. 

“One thing that we have learned, and this came on the tail end of the Biden administration, when their Department of Justice admitted that they had many, I mean, more than two dozen, paid informants embedded in the crowd,” committee chairman Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) told the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show on Monday.

“And so my question is, you know…our FBI does pay to have informants through different organizations, and their primary job is intelligence, you know, to provide information. But, with that many paid informants being in the crowd, we want to know how many were in the crowd, how many were in the building, but I also want to know, were they paid to inform or instigate?” Loudermilk continued.

It has been suggested that some FBI informants might have egged on protesters to enter the Capitol, helping to cause the riots rather than just observing them or trying to get information from people who were there.

Must have known

Loudermilk also said that the FBI must have known that a massive protest like the one on January 6 was coming if their informants did their jobs properly ahead of that day.

“​​But of these informants, if they were paid to inform, what information did the FBI actually get from them? How did they not know that this was coming?” Loudermilk asked.

“If they had that many paid informants, I believe they did know it was coming," he declared.

He suggested that information could have been kept back by anti-Trump informants who wanted a huge stain on MAGA's reputation, which did end up happening in the aftermath of the breach.

"You know that we do have evidence that there were people that were instigating, such as a Metropolitan Police Officer that was undercover in plainclothes. The question would be — when we get more evidence of people who are instigating that may be part of the government or maybe in law enforcement — were they caught up in the moment, or did they have orders to do this? Was this pre-planned?” Loudermilk asked.

“Or is it just something that somebody decided, you know, that would be really good if we could catch some of these MAGA people rioting at the end of 2020…not necessarily thinking they're going to get into the Capitol, but maybe?” the chairman continued.

New committee, new focus

It's clear that Loudermilk believes the riots were allowed to happen or even instigated by some on the left for political reasons, so we will see if his investigation finds evidence that was the case.

The subcommittee was formed in January to investigate what happened on January 6, 2021, and differs from the House Select Committee on January 6, which was Democrat-led and was used to blame President Donald Trump for the Capitol breach and subsequent chaos and damage by protesters who ostensibly supported his re-election in 2020.

The perception that some of the protesters were egged on by leftists, coupled with the fact that many January 6 participants were charged with much more serious crimes than others who did similar things, led President Donald Trump to pardon everyone who has been charged or convicted in the events of that day.

Clearly, we don't want a repeat of thousands of people entering unlawfully into a D.C. government building, but it's also important to understand what really happened that day if we want to prevent such a repeat.