In a bizarre development, Axios is now reporting that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who owes his speakership to deals struck with House Republican allies of the Jan. 6 coup attempt, has given "exclusive access" to "41,000 hours" of U.S. Capitol surveillance footage from that day to ... Fox News' Tucker Carlson and his producers.
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Yeah, that Tucker Carlson, the promoter of white nationalist conspiracy theories and one of the Fox hosts that helped promote the false "election fraud" conspiracies Republicans used to justify attempts to nullify Donald Trump's 2020 presidential election loss. Tucker Carlson's team of conspiracy theorists is now being granted access to thousands of hours of sensitive footage from Capitol security cameras so that they can fish for new conspiracy theories defending the violent rioters.
While Tucker Carlson himself told Politico's Mike Allen that it's "impossible for me to understand why any honest person would be bothered by" McCarthy providing security footage exclusively to him, it's impossible to imagine any reason for McCarthy limiting the footage's release to a single coup-defending conspiracy crank. It's transparently obvious that the move is meant to provide Tucker with, for example, footage of random staffers getting coffee before the attack that Carlson's producers can clip into a new conspiracy theorizing that "well, maybe it wasn't coffee" or "and here we see [random staffer] casing out the hallway on behalf of antifa."
This is what Carlson is all about; he's intentionally dishonest, and the latest releases of Carlson texts in Dominion's lawsuit against Fox once again prove it behind a shadow of a doubt.
The intent of McCarthy's action is obvious. His ability to make it happen is more curious; footage from the security cameras inside the Capitol has been deemed so sensitive that even releasing the most relevant footage of the attacks was controversial. Many of the cameras are in portions of the building that the public is not permitted inside, and releasing footage that would show both the layout of those private areas and the position of each security camera inside is still considered a substantial security risk.
Unless you're a white nationalist promoter of foreign autocracies who has repeatedly dismissed the violence inside the Capitol and who wants to use that footage to concoct new defenses for the Jan. 6 attackers, apparently?
Rep. Kevin McCarthy continues to pretend at playing both sides of the seditionist fence, but in practice, he's supported pro-coup and pro-disinformation Republicans every step of the way. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is back on committees; McCarthy launched a new committee devoted exclusively to Republican conspiracy theories about the "weaponization" of government against them; McCarthy tried everything in his power to scuttle House investigations of the Jan. 6 coup from the very beginning.
While McCarthy previously bleated about releasing the full Capitol footage to all of the "American public," when push comes to shove, he chose to hand it "exclusively" to the most pro-Putin, pro-rioter, pro-conspiracy far-right host on television. And that host will have his people looking hard for anything that can be used to launch their next hoax.
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