FBI apparently wasn’t a very cooperative witness.

“Congressional investigators who examined the F.B.I.’s response never received from the bureau many key documents they requested. The bureau provided about 2,000 documents in total; the Secret Service, by comparison, offered more than 1,000,000 electronic communications.”

To put this into context, former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows turned over 6,800 pages of emails and 2,300 text messages to the committee.

Further, committee investigators interviewed just two FBI officials, one of whom retired in February 2021. Top brass was left untouched; FBI Director Christopher Wray isn’t mentioned once in the report. Neither is Steven D’Antuono, former head of the Washington FBI office responsible for collecting intelligence before January 6 and handling the criminal investigation afterward. Several witnesses told the committee that everything flowed through D’Antuono—alerts from other FBI field offices, travel plans of suspected bad actors, threatening social media posts—but D’Antuono didn’t speak to congressional investigators. Why not?

But perhaps the most brazen coverup of government materials pertaining to January 6 is from none other than General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Milley made a number of alarming disclosures to the committee during his November 2021 interview, not the least of which an off-the-record press conference he held the night before Election Day.

“There was general unease and atmospherics that were being reported back to me and us about unrest, potential for violence,” Milley said in between repeated assurances the military does not surveil American citizens, cannot take a lead role in domestic law enforcement, and does not get involved in politics. “So my public affairs guy decided it would be a good idea to go ahead and do a backgrounder with a variety of news anchors to, you know, transmit a message of stability with the United States military. Again, this goes back to the military being involved in domestic politics. We have no part in that. Zero.”

Milley also confirmed what every top administration official also told the committee: high-level discussions about January 6 took place weeks in advance. “So there was a series of meetings prior to the 6th—interagency meetings, with Acting Defense Secretary [Christopher] Miller, [National Security Advisor Robert] O’Brien, you’ve got Acting Attorney General [Jeffrey] Rosen at that point. There’s a whole bunch. And I’m involved in those meetings as well.”

Milley classified everything related to his involvement in those matters. “Immediately following the 6th, I knew the significance, and I asked my staff, freeze all your records, collate them, get them collected up.”

Milley continued. “And we actually classified it at a pretty high level, and we put it on [Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System], the top secret stuff. It’s not that the substance is classified. It was, I wanted to make sure that this stuff was only going to go to people who appropriately needed to see it, like yourselves.”

So, Milley instructed his staff to aggregate material he knew was not classified in “substance” but nonetheless categorized the files as top secret government records to be subsequently archived on a secure site that catalogs sensitive military intelligence?