One of the deals Kevin McCarthy made to get ahold of the speaker’s gavel was the release of footage from the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as a mob of Trump supporters attacked the building to stop Congress from certifying the election. He’s already taken steps in that direction, giving Fox News host Tucker Carlson access to the footage with a plan to allow him to air some of it. From there, McCarthy plans to publicly release more footage—but some Republicans are starting to ask questions about how that might compromise safety.
Once you’ve let Tucker Carlson’s people look at the footage, the safety issue is pretty well moot. Carlson has alternated between rooting for the insurrectionists and downplaying what they did, while, basically every week lately, we’re learning about another way that Fox News has acted directly as an arm of the Republican Party. Tucker’s people could well have been in there taking detailed notes to pass along to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—it wouldn’t be out of character at all. McCarthy has given Carlson the ammunition to share information with people who will use it to make Congress less safe and to show clips that will create a false narrative of the attack.
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In December 2021, Marcy Wheeler detailed how security footage released as part of a Jan. 6 defendant’s trial compromised safety, by showing anyone who sees the footage a way that a security camera was effectively taken out of commission under certain circumstances. The footage that Tucker Carlson’s producers have now seen will have offered many more such pointers.
But from here, Republicans are saying they’ll pay attention to security in releasing footage publicly. In other words, they’ve already compromised security, and now they’re pretending to care. McCarthy wasn’t taking questions about it on Monday, CNN reports, but his very close ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had things to say.
“We can’t give away our national security,” Greene told CNN. “Everyone in Congress agrees. And I think the American people agree. We don’t want Russia or China or any of these other countries being able to study all the entries and exits of our capital. That’s foolish.”
Yes, Marjorie, Russia and China are the big concerns here when it comes to attacking the U.S. Capitol. Not the people with an actual record of doing so, people you’ve vocally supported. Sure, maybe Russia and China are also concerns, but many of the same people in the security footage are still out there, or will be out of jail before too long, or have allies out there. This is also an interesting concern to hear from someone who, just a couple of days ago, was moaning to Carlson about “this war against Russia in Ukraine.” That’s just the latest in a long string of times Greene has ranted against supporting Ukraine’s self-defense against Russia, but going from complaining about a “war against Russia in Ukraine” to pretending to be concerned about Russia seeing security footage of the U.S. Capitol is next-level whiplash.
Additionally, if Russia is a concern, well, Carlson, hasn’t just supported the Jan. 6 mob, he also sucks up to Vladimir Putin on a regular basis. That’s why Greene’s “war against Russia in Ukraine” line came on Carlson’s show—they’re aligned in that regard. So again, simply limiting what Carlson can air publicly is of limited utility when you’ve allowed his producers unfettered access.
There may be a public interest in seeing more of the footage from the Capitol on January 6, and some of that public interest may go directly against Republican interests, by showing the scale and ferocity of the attack. But Republicans cannot be trusted to allow either an honest sampling of what actually happened that day to get out or to have safety as a priority in releasing the footage.
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