Breaking down claims about congresspeople and pre-Jan. 6 Capitol tours

The Jan. 6 committee on Thursday requested information from Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) about a tour he gave in the Capitol complex on Jan. 5, 2021 — a tour Loudermilk later confirmed in a statement responding to the committee. It appears to be the first time the committee has cited evidence of such a tour.

And to the committee and other observers, that evidence calls into question Republicans’ past denials. This is worth taking a moment to parse.

In a May 2021 ethics complaint against Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.), a House member who first raised the claim about “reconnaissance” tours, Loudermilk said: “No Republican member of Congress led any kind of ‘reconnaissance’ tours through the Capitol, proven by security footage captured by the U.S. Capitol Police.”

In February, the ranking Republican on the House Administration Committee, Rep. Rodney Davis (Ill.), echoed that in his response to a letter from 34 House Democrats, led by Sherrill, who sought answers about possible tours.

An unnamed House GOP aide followed that up by offering a broader denial to the Hill.

“There were no tours, no large groups, no one with MAGA hats on,” the aide said. “There’s nothing in there remotely fitting the depiction in Mikie Sherrill’s letter.”

We now know there was a tour.

The Jan. 6 committee cited the anonymous GOP aide’s quote in its letter to Loudermilk, saying its “evidence directly contradicts that denial.”

Loudermilk and Davis then responded in a way that seemed to confirm that some tour occurred: “A constituent family with young children meeting with their Member of Congress in the House Office Buildings is not a suspicious group or ‘reconnaissance tour,’” Loudermilk and Davis said in a joint statement Thursday. They said the family never entered the Capitol that day or on Jan. 6.

So does the evidence contradict their denials? The denials from Loudermilk and the House Administration Committee’s GOP side specifically addressed the concept of reconnaissance tours, of which there’s still no public evidence. As for the anonymous denial in the Hill, it again seems possible the intent was to deny more specific types of tours — ones that were actually nefarious.

But it’s important to note that the letter Davis and the anonymous aide were responding to — from Sherrill and 33 Democratic colleagues — didn’t specifically mention “reconnaissance” tours, either. Nor did it necessarily argue that a given member or aide was in on the plot.

Her letter had cited “suspicious behavior and access given to visitors to the Capitol Complex” and “an extremely high number of outside groups in the complex,” despite restrictions on public tours. It said that “the fact remains that there were unusually large groups of people throughout the Capitol who could only have gained access to the Capitol Complex from a Member of Congress or a member of their staff.”

The implication was clearly that members or their staffs might have at least assisted future insurrectionists to access the Capitol complex — but that implication wasn’t spelled out explicitly in terms of providing “reconnaissance” tours.

The letter went on to ask several entities about any relevant information, “including names of Members or staff who were part of these tours.”

In that context, even the denial that there were any “tours … remotely fitting the depiction in Mikie Sherrill’s letter” is overly broad; we’ve now indeed learned the name of a “member” who was “part of” a tour.

But we’re also still waiting for any real substantiation for the kind of activity Sherrill and some others pointed to. While the letter stopped short of “reconnaissance” tours, she herself didn’t in her previous comments.

On Jan. 12, 2021, Sherrill said on a Facebook Live event that she had seen “members of Congress who had groups coming through the Capitol that I saw on Jan. 5 for reconnaissance for the next day.”

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) offered some backup. When asked whether there had indeed been a “tour for the insurrectionists,” he responded, “I can confirm that.” He said he hadn’t witnessed it firsthand but heard about it from a colleague, and he suggestively referenced “some of our new colleagues” in Congress.

But neither named which members might have given such tours.

Other Democrats were more cautious. A number of them said merely that they witnessed colleagues giving some kinds of tours — i.e. not necessarily to people who ultimately stormed the Capitol. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) pointed to Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) but qualified his statement by saying he didn’t know if the touring group was involved in the insurrection. (Boebert later said she gave a tour to her family, but nobody else.)

It seems entirely possible that a GOP lawmaker did give a tour to someone who ultimately stormed the Capitol; there were lots of people in Washington, and we now know at least one GOP lawmaker made himself available to give a tour.

Whether any such tour was part of a planning operation — or whether the member would even have known that — is another matter. The onus is on the members making those more far-reaching accusations to substantiate them; otherwise it looks like too much overheated rhetoric.

But Republicans have strained to acknowledge even the possibility of more anodyne tours. Now we learn there was indeed one, at least.

The question from there is how committed the Jan. 6 committee is to exploring this question — or whether it merely wants to put out there that a tour of some kind took place, substantiating what some Democrats (though not all) were saying. Thus far, what we know remains in the mushy middle.