In the last Congress, House Republicans created their own panel to investigate the Jan. 6 attack as part of a purely partisan exercise: GOP officials wanted an alternative to the bipartisan Jan. 6 committee and hoped a rival entity would establish a counternarrative.

Predictably, it was a flop. The panel, led by Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, released a report on its findings, which was effectively meaningless and broke no new ground. If the goal was to rewrite the story, it failed. Even most Republicans blew it off.

Then, last year, Republicans came up with a new idea: They’d ask the same committee, led by the same far-right lawmaker, to do even more investigating.

At the time, there didn’t appear to be any point to asking a failed committee to fail again, but it now appears the partisan exercise still has some scores to settle. CNN reported:

Republicans on Capitol Hill are asking the Justice Department to consider bringing criminal charges against Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide in President Donald Trump’s first administration who became a star congressional witness about the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, according to two sources familiar with recent developments.

GOP Rep. Barry Loudermilk made a criminal referral of Hutchinson to the Justice Department in recent days, the sources said. He accused Hutchinson of lying to Congress in her summer 2022 testimony when she alleged Trump was aware of the potential for violence on January 6, 2021, and forged ahead with his attempts to rile up his supporters.

The report has not been independently verified by MS NOW, though its details dovetail with a recent congressional hearing in which GOP members pressed former special counsel Jack Smith with questions about Hutchinson. (The prosecutor made it clear that Hutchinson’s testimony played little, if any, role in his decision to bring criminal charges against Trump.)

CNN’s report also followed similar reporting from 2024 about Loudermilk and his committee specifically focusing its energies on Hutchinson, a former aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. (Relatedly, Kash Patel, before the podcast personality became the FBI director, included Hutchinson on his notorious “government gangsters” enemies list.)

Based on the publicly available information, there’s no reason to believe Hutchinson, who delivered stunning Jan. 6 testimony nearly four years ago, did anything wrong. What’s more, there’s no reason to believe the criminal referral will amount to anything: In the last Congress, the same Republican-led panel asked the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation into former House GOP Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney for foolish reasons that collapsed under scrutiny, and the referral was ignored.

But given the degree to which the Trump DOJ is (a) controlled by the president; and (b) determined to punish the president’s perceived political foes, it’s probably best not to dismiss these developments out of hand. Watch this space.