Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is not concerned about criticism from Democrats or the mainstream media after releasing over 40,000 hours of footage from the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired the unedited footage on his program for several days following McCarthy’s sharing of it.
As part of McCarthy’s announcement to the media, he promised to make all of the tapes available to the public after his team reviews them in order to resolve any potential security concerns.
“This is the challenge. The Democrats told us it was only 14,000 hours of tapes, lo and behold, we take the majority and it’s 42,000 hours, so that would take me years to go all the way through,” McCarthy told reporters. “Yeah, I think the public should see what’s happened to them.”
“We’ve worked with the Capitol Police [to] tell us about [any] section that there was a problem. And that takes a long time. But we want to make sure everybody has the opportunity to come and see what they want,” he said. “So we’ve created the process to make that start happening.”
Almost a month after his promise, McCarthy is facing increasing pressure to release footage to the media.
“Nine major media organizations have sued the Justice Department and the FBI for access to the video footage of the Jan. 6 insurrection. The nine include The New York Times, CNN, the Associated Press, and ProPublica. Public materials must be truly public. If Mr. McCarthy can give the stash to one talk show host, he can, and should, give it to every media organization and the public at large,” The Post-Gazette reported.
“That’s why the speaker must release the material to everyone. Everyone must have the chance to watch it and decide the narrative, and the more narratives we have, the better chance the public has of knowing what happened,” the outlet added.
In addition, Republican members of the House are establishing their own jan. 6 committee to “reinvestigate” what happened at the Capitol in 2021.
In speaking on the mission, Georgia Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk, who will chair the new panel, says they will “investigate both sides” and “show what really happened on Jan. 6.”
According to CBS News, Loudermilk also said the panel would consider interviewing former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about Capitol security before Jan. 6.
Pelosi was excorciated in a explosive report issued by the House Republicans for her failures in the security and intelligence of the US Capitol for January 6, 2021.
Pelosi’s staff held regular meetings about security detail, assisted authorities in editing their plans, and refused several requests from federal law enforcement for help protecting the Capitol on that day, according to emails and text messages from the then Speaker’s office.
“Days after Pelosi’s Jan. 6 select committee recommended insurrection charges against former president Donald Trump over the Capitol riot, Republicans have hit back with a counter-investigation apportioning blame for the internal security breakdown on Jan. 6 to Pelosi and a dysfunctional Capitol Police intelligence division,” New York Post reported.
The New York Post further noted:
House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving, who answered to Pelosi as one of three voting members of the Capitol Police Board, “succumbed to political pressures from the Office of Speaker Pelosi and House Democrat leadership,” was “compromised by politics and did not adequately prepare for violence at the Capitol.”
Pelosi and her staff “coordinated closely” with Irving on security plans for the Joint Session of Congress on Jan. 6, but Republicans were deliberately left out of “important discussions related to security.”
And, in an apparent attempt to hide from Republicans the fact that they were being excluded from discussions, Irving asked a senior Democratic staffer to “act surprised” when he sent “key information about plans for the Joint Session on Jan. 6, 2021, to him and his Republican counterpart.”
In the absence of evidence, the report asserts “staff within the House Sergeant at Arms office emailed Paul Irving that January 6th was Pelosi’s fault.”
The report claims the Speaker’s office “helped edit authorities’ plans, and turned down several requests from federal law enforcement needed to protect the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“I have no power over the Capitol Police. Does anybody not know that? The Capitol Police have responded to that gentleman’s allegation, and that stands as what it is. But I have no power over the police,” Pelosi’s office said in February.
