Rachel Maddow just asked the right question when it comes to Barry Loudermilk’s Capitol tour

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In a sign of just how groundbreaking and historic these January 6th public hearings are, Rachel Maddow – who of late has only been appearing on MSNBC once a week on Monday nights – appeared on the air tonight for the third night in a row. Maddow wasted no time

When the January 6th Committee released proof today that Rep. Barry Loudermilk gave a January 5th Capitol tour to a group that included at least one individual who turned out to be an insurrectionist, it raised all kinds of questions. For instance, why did Loudermilk spend so long insisting that he never gave this tour?

Even as Loudermilk’s career gets turned upside down by this revelation, there is an equally important question at play. Earlier this week, multiple major news outlets ran a story about how the Capitol Police had supposedly reviewed Loudermilk’s tour and determined that there was nothing suspicious about it. This seemed incredibly suspicious at the time, and it felt like an attempt at preemptively muddying the waters. Sure enough, now there’s photographic evidence showing that a member of Loudermilk’s tour group was photographing stairwells and other strategic parts of the building.

During her show tonight, Rachel Maddow asked the essential question in all of this: why did the Capitol Police make a point of issuing this false claim to the media, when it had to know this evidence was about to surface? What were the Capitol Police attempting to accomplish with this? What, if anything, were they covering for? Something doesn’t add up here – and at the rate these things are unfolding, we expect it’ll all come out before much longer.