The Daily Fuckup

On Dec. 21, 2022, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol made another round of witness testimony public. The committee’s materials page shows the Dec. 21 release as part of a sequence of late-December disclosures that continued through Jan. 2, 2023. The Dec. 21 batch added to a record the panel had spent the year assembling through transcripts, interviews, documents, and other evidence. ([january6th-benniethompson.house.gov](https://january6th-benniethompson.house.gov/media-center/select-committee-witness-materials))

The timing was notable because it came one day after House Ways and Means Democrats voted on Dec. 20, 2022, to release portions of Donald Trump’s tax information. Ways and Means later framed that vote in a Dec. 22 statement defending the move. The two developments were not the same-day event the earlier version of this story described; they landed back to back in a week already crowded with Trump-related disclosures. ([waysandmeans.house.gov](https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2022/12/22/fact-check-democrats-release-of-confidential-tax-returns-was-unprecedented-and-unnecessary/))

The Jan. 6 committee’s Dec. 21 post did not announce a new theory of the case. It did something narrower and more durable: it added more witness material to the committee’s public record. By that point, the panel had already signaled in its final report that it believed Trump and his allies had pursued a multi-step effort to overturn the 2020 election and block or delay the transfer of power. The committee’s report, later filed in Congress, laid out that conclusion in detail. ([january6th-benniethompson.house.gov](https://january6th-benniethompson.house.gov/media-center/select-committee-witness-materials))

The practical effect of the release was to widen the paper trail, not to settle every remaining dispute. Trump’s allies continued to attack the committee’s methods and motives, while the committee kept putting transcripts and related records online for anyone to read. That left the public with a steadily growing archive of sworn testimony from a long investigation that was moving toward its final accounting. ([january6th-benniethompson.house.gov](https://january6th-benniethompson.house.gov/media-center/select-committee-witness-materials))