Jan. 6 committee counsel leaving to explore run for Senate in Missouri

Wood ran the committee’s “gold team,” which examined former president Donald Trump’s possible involvement in the siege on the U.S. Capitol, and appeared alongside lawmakers on the panel last week to question witnesses during the hearing focused on the pressure campaign targeting then-Vice President Mike Pence. People involved with the investigation say that Wood is leaving his role with the encouragement of his team and is on good terms with committee staff.

News of his departure comes after former Missouri governor Eric Greitens released an ad for his U.S. Senate campaign showing him pretending to hunt down members of his own party.

“Today we’re goin’ RINO hunting,” Greitens announces in the video, using the derisive phrase “Republicans in Name Only.”

A campaign committee for Wood launched a website and started fundraising on Monday, triggering a 10-day window to formally file with the Federal Election Commission, consultant Steven Crim said. The committee’s treasurer is Mark Eggert, a former associate vice chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis.

The campaign decided to launch Monday because of Greitens’s “RINO hunting ad,” Crim said. He said he expected a formal decision from Wood on whether to run within a week.

The campaign has to file 10,000 signatures by Aug. 1 to get Wood on the ballot as an independent candidate, Crim said. Wood would have the support of former senator John Danforth (R-Mo.), who is raising money for a super PAC to back an independent candidate.

Danforth said his group polled Missouri voters in February and found broad dissatisfaction with both parties and political polarization.

“If John Wood enters the race, he will be head and shoulders better qualified to be a U.S. senator than anybody else,” Danforth said in an interview. “What’s happened now is politics is so, to a lot of people, disgusting that people would like to go to the polls and vote ‘none of the above.’ But that doesn’t count. The way it counts is to vote for this independent.”