January 6 investigator fired from day job by Virginia’s Republican attorney general

Pressure on select committee is reaching a new pitch as members prepare a year of public hearings

One of the lead staffers for the select committee investigating the 6 January Capitol riot has been fired from his job at the University of Virginia (UVA) by the state’s newly elected Republican attorney general.

Timothy Heaphy serves as the panel’s top investigator, and has been on leave from his university role while working in that capacity. For the last three years he has served as UVA’s legal counsel, a job appointed by the attorney general’s office.

Virginia’s newly installed Republican attorney general, Jason Miyares, fired both Mr Heaphy and his counterpart at George Mason University, Brian Walther, along with some 30 staffers.

A spokeswoman for Mr Miyares told The Washington Post that the firings were nothing to do with the 6 January panel but instead were based on “the legal decisions made over the last couple of years” – and that “the Attorney General wants the university counsel to return to giving legal advice based on law, and not the philosophy of a university. We plan to look internally first for the next lead counsel”.

The news of Mr Heaphy’s firing comes as the 6 January select committee reaches a critical point, with less than a year to go until the swearing in of a new House of Representatives highly likely to be controlled by Republicans. That gives the panel just months to solicit and demand as much testimony as it can, both privately and in public, before publishing some form of report and recommending any criminal charges for which it might find evidence.

House Republicans have been pushing back hard against the panel as its work continues, and especially as members themselves are called upon to testify to it. Among those summoned has been Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who responded by refusing to appear while mischaracterising the committee as a partisan kangaroo court set up to distract from the Democrats’ struggle to pass their agenda into law. (It was in fact Mr McCarthy who withdrew three of his chosen Republican nominees from the panel after Nancy Pelosi accepted them.)

Virginia’s elections in November 2021 marked a low point for the Democrats as the state – which voted Democratic in the last four presidential elections and has two Democratic US Senators – elected a Republican governor and lieutenant governor along with the new attorney general.