President Donald Trump was sworn in today at the U.S. Capitol, returning to the White House after winning a second term in the 2024 election.
The USA TODAY Fact Check Team is monitoring the inauguration ceremony, other addresses from Trump and former Present Joe Biden and reactions from around the country to sort fact from fiction and add context where needed.
Our team uses primary documents, trustworthy nonpartisan sources, data and other research tools to assess the accuracy of claims.
Donald Trump claim: Jan. 6 committee deleted records, Pelosi turned down soldiers
“They literally, what they did is they destroyed and deleted all the information, all of the hearings … all of the information on Nancy Pelosi having turned down the offer of 10,000 soldiers (on Jan. 6, 2021).”
Trump and his supporters have made similar claims in the past, but they’re still wrong. Trump spoke at length about the topic in unscripted remarks at Emancipation Hall after he was sworn in as president, repeating several talking points have been repeatedly debunked.
The bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol released a more than 800-page report in 2022 that described how Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election fueled the riot. It also released troves of supporting materials, including videos, transcripts of interviews and other court documents.
In August 2023, Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Republican from Georgia, told Fox News that the committee had failed to properly preserve some of its documents, data and video depositions. But, as Factcheck.org reported, Loudermilk never claimed the committee’s records were destroyed, though Trump alleged that in a social media post at the time.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi who chaired the committee, had already written to Loudermilk on July 7, 2023, saying that more than a million records from the committee had been set aside for “publication and archiving.”
There is also no evidence that Trump requested to deploy 10,000 National Guard troops to the Capitol ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, rally, nor is there evidence that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denied such a request, as USA TODAY previously reported. Drew Hammill, a spokesperson for Pelosi, told USA TODAY in 2021 that Pelosi’s office was not contacted about any request for National Guard troops before Jan. 6, 2021, and noted that Pelosi would not have the power to reject that type of request.
