The members of the House January 6 Committee, which has since been disbanded, released the Social Security numbers attached to multiple hundreds of Americans, which included a number of staffers that formerly worked for Trump and many other top Republican officials.
In the wake of the committee’s final public meeting held last month, it made public an insane level of official records, transcripts, testimonies, and other bits of personal information that it had previously gathered throughout the 18-month investigation regarding the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. One of the documents which were released by the committee was a massive spreadsheet that contained a list of 2,000 Social Security Numbers of those who had paid visits to the White House back in December 2020.
On that list of released Social Security numbers, which have since been removed from the released trove of files, was information that dealt with a least three Trump cabinet members, as well as some Republican governors and a large number of officials and allies, as explained by The Washington Post. The people whose information was revealed in the spreadsheet now find themselves sitting at an “elevated risk” of being targeted by and becoming the victims of identity theft-related crimes, explained James Lee, the Identity Theft Resource Center COO.
The committee seems to have not quickly notified any of the individuals about the data leak. One spokesman for South Dakota Republican Governor Kristi Noem whose information was discovered to be on the now redacted document, Ian Fury, stated, “To my knowledge, we were not notified. The governor was not notified.”
Ben Carson, the Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary whose information was also revealed on the document, explained to the Post: “Whether it was a careless and sloppy handling of records or a deliberate disregard of decorum, either scenario is a perfunctory and callous display of government and a frightening reminder of the current state in Washington. … President Reagan was a savant indeed — the nine most frightening words to hear are ‘I am from the government and here to help.’”
The committee explained that all information sent to the public was first looked over for sensitive personal information and that any info made public with sensitive information such as Social Security numbers was a mistake.
The January 6 committee, which had been filled with a number of Democratic lawmakers which included a pair of former GOP legislators, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, looked into the January 6 riot at the Capitol while also putting extreme emphasis on the role of former President Donald Trump in the events that took place.