The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol is admitting that it altered a text message exchange between former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, a spokesman for the committee said, “The Select Committee on Monday created and provided Representative Schiff a graphic to use during the business meeting quoting from a text message from ‘a lawmaker’ to Mr. Meadows.”
“The graphic read, ‘On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.’ In the graphic, the period at the end of that sentence was added inadvertently,” the statement continued.
Finally, it read, “The Select Committee is responsible for and regrets the error.”
The admission comes after a report suggested that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) had “sliced and diced” and added content to the message.
The Federalist reported on Wednesday that the text message altered by the committee was a three-paragraph legal summary written by attorney Joseph Schmitz about the certification of the 2020 election sent to the Ohio Congressman. Jordan forwarded the message to Meadows on Jan. 5, 2021.
According to the outlet, the message “included an attachment of a four-page draft Word document drafted by Schmitz that detailed Schmitz’s legal reasoning for suggesting that Pence had the constitutional authority to object to the certification of electoral votes submitted by a handful of states.”
“The piece that Schmitz had sent to Jordan was published at the website everylegal.vote the next morning and even included the same ‘DISCUSSION DRAFT’ heading and timestamp as the document that Schmitz sent to Jordan,” it added.
During a committee meeting on Monday, Schiff displayed a graphic of the text. However, the last two paragraphs of the summary were not included.
As The Federalist reports, “In his statement, Schiff erased the final two paragraphs and the final clause of the first paragraph of the text message before inserting punctuation that was never there, all without disclosing what he was doing.”
“The graphic displayed by Schiff, which was doctored to look like an exact screenshot, was similarly doctored, as it contained content that was never in the original message and eliminated content that was,” it added.
It went on to assert that Schiff “sliced and diced” the legal summary “and then attributed to Jordan.”
The Washington Examiner obtained the original text by Schmitz from the committee’s spokesman, which read:
“On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all — in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence. No legislative act,’ wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 78, ‘contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.’ The court in Hubbard v. Lowe reinforced this truth: ‘That an unconstitutional statute is not a law at all is a proposition no longer open to discussion.’ 226 F. 135, 137 (SDNY 1915), appeal dismissed, 242 U.S. 654 (1916).”
The text continued, “Following this rationale, an unconstitutionally appointed elector, like an unconstitutionally enacted statute, is no elector at all.”
