Republican Congressman Caught Running ‘Shadow’ Investigation Into Capitol Riot

Records have revealed that Republican Representative Jim Banks has been conducting his own version of a January 6th investigation, in spite of the fact that he was kicked off the Select Committee before it even began. Banks has been writing to government agencies and even tech companies, claiming to be a "ranking member" who needs access to the same materials these groups handed over to the Select Committee. This seems like a lot of fraud, as Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

A member of the house of representatives on the Republican side has apparently been conducting his own little shadow investigation into the Capitol riots and this individual Republican representative Jim banks, who actually was chosen by house minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, to serve on the January six select committee before Nancy Pelosi said, absolutely not. You cannot have him on there. And of course you can't have Jim Jordan, neither because they think the whole thing is stupid. And that's what sparked McCarthy to be like, well fine. I'll take all my Republicans and leave, but Mr. Banks didn't think the job was done yet. So what Mr. Banks has been doing is sending letters to all of the governmental groups and to Facebook, at least demanding access to the same materials that these groups have turned over to the January 6th select committee. That includes the department of justice, the department of defense and the department of Homeland security.

And of course, several social media companies of which we know for a fact, he is sent a letter to Facebook. Now here's the problem in these letters, which the daily beast has seen. He refers to himself as ranking member. Now ranking member implies that he is a ranking member on the January 6th select committee, because that's how you become a ranking member. If you're not on the committee, you're not a ranking member. You just a member of the house of representatives, not of the committee. So it would seem based on what I'm reading here in daily beasts, that Mr. Banks is the frauding. These people.

Now he claims he is totally not defrauding anybody because you know his as member of the house representatives, the Republicans are entitled to the same playmate information, except you're not, you're not, you're absolutely not. If you're on the committee, you get your hands on this. That doesn't mean that literally just anybody else in the house of representatives can say all sweet. Hey, give me a copy of that. That's not how this works. 100% not how this works. If it were, you would have all of the other Republicans in the house as well, requesting the same information. And most importantly, what the hell do you think you're going to do with it? You're not on the committee. You're not actually investigating anybody. So the best I can assume here is that you want to get your hands on this information, strategize with all your other little Republicans who are also not on the committee, then take your case to the American press and try to disparage the information before the Democrats.

And couple of Republicans on that committee have a chance to fully explain it during the committee hearings. That is what I think is happening right now. But if Mr. Banks is in fact, as the reports say he is, and they've seen the documents, if he is referring to himself as ranking member, that should be grounds for expulsion. And I know, oh, they could censure him. Oh, we could do this. We could do that. Then none of that matters. He needs to be expelled from Congress. That is an abuse of power. It is fraud, and he should be kicked out plain and simple. But of course that is also never going to happen because you're not going to get enough Republicans to go with. The Democrats got to have two thirds in order to kick somebody out. So of course, yeah, that's not going to happen, but we need to know that you tried folks. That's the point of this. Sometimes knowing that you put effort into this is enough, but what Mr. Banks is doing here is deeply sinister. It needs to be stopped. And the only way to do that is for Democrats to get out ahead of the issue, make their case to the press, expose all of this horrendous behavior by Mr. Banks, get the public on your side and discredit him before he tries to twist the information and discredit you.