As it happens, that wasn’t altogether true. GOP officials didn’t want to look back at Trump’s pardons from January 2025, but they most certainly want to look back at the insurrectionist violence from January 2021. NBC News reported:

House Republicans are moving to create a new select subcommittee to ‘continue Congress’ investigation’ of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, chaired by Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga. The House will have to vote on the resolution to establish the subcommittee, which would fall under the Judiciary Committee.

The House speaker — the one who said, “We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward” after Trump put violent criminals back on American streets — boasted this week that his party should further investigate Jan. 6 because “there is clearly more work to be done.”.....

In the months that followed, Loudermilk said he intended to determine “what really happened” on Jan. 6, indifferent to the fact that we already learned what really happened.

More than a year after launching the partisan probe, Loudermilk and his GOP colleagues released a report on their findings, which was effectively meaningless and broke no new ground. The document appeared to be designed to undermine the bipartisan House Jan. 6 committee from the previous Congress, but it failed, and even most Republicans blew it off as irrelevant......

It’s against this backdrop that the House Republican leaders settled on a brilliant idea: Johnson wants the same congressman who failed in his Jan. 6 investigation in the last Congress to keep going with another Jan. 6 investigation in the current Congress — all while telling the public that GOP lawmakers are “looking forward” and leaving Jan. 6 in the rearview mirror. He said this week that Republicans “are proud” to be “exposing false narratives” from the Jan. 6 committee in the 117th Congress.

MAGA activists who are expecting blockbuster revelations should probably start lowering their expectations now.