Ever since Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy decided that producers for far-right Fox News host Tucker Carlson—who has repeatedly defended and downplayed the Jan. 6 coup attempt and sympathized with those who participated in it—would be given exclusive first access to sensitive U.S. Capitol security footage of the violence, House Republicans have been scrambling to defend themselves from charges that it's a Republican move meant to benefit those arrested for engaging in the pro-Trump violence.
Those House Republican defenses have been falling very flat, and this new news isn't going to make things better: Politico is now reporting that Rep. Barry Loudermilk, chair of an oversight subpanel of the House Administration Committee, is indicating that Republicans will support the release of security camera footage to the arrested defendants now facing federal charges for their roles in the violence. Footage would be released on a "case-by-case" basis, says Loudermilk.
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It's a bit curious that Politico was not able to nail down whether the Republican move would ensure similar access to the federal prosecutors looking to prove their cases against the rioters. Some footage has been used in those prosecutions, but to public knowledge, even the Department of Justice has not been granted full access to those tapes. A big catch here, however, is that any of the security camera footage that made it into those court cases would likely then become public.
An unrestricted release of Capitol security camera footage would be, and with Tucker Carlson's all-access pass has already become, a national security nightmare. Security footage of nonpublic areas, of emergency exits, evacuation routes, and similar sensitive information could be used as a roadmap for future attacks, just as insurrection-minded militia members used knowledge of Capitol tunnel systems in their attempts to head off and capture members of Congress. Even the location of each security camera is sensitive information, whether in a public area or not.
And, as Marcy Wheeler has pointed out, the first security footage successfully released by attorneys for a Jan. 6 defendant has already demonstrated a means by which future attackers could effectively render those cameras useless.
Those security concerns were precisely why the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks had to engage in protracted negotiations that limited what footage could be released and what couldn't. There's been no similar Republican effort to restrict what Tucker Carlson's production team is able to view, and House Republicans are still evasive about the precise steps that will be taken when releasing footage to anyone else. House leaders are instead trying to play both sides of that fence, distancing themselves from the McCarthy decision to allow unfettered access to a conspiracy-peddling far-right television show while notably avoiding any promise that they'll follow the same security protocols as that previous committee.
From the outside, McCarthy's move has seemed transparently to be yet another attempt to fog investigative conclusions about the Jan. 6 attacks by launching fishing expeditions looking for some moment of tape, anywhere, that could be used to claim that "antifa" or other conservative enemies had tricked the insurrectionists into attacking hundreds of law enforcement officers in an attempt to kidnap or execute lawmakers. Tucker Carlson is just one of the many, many far-right figures who have stoked such conspiracy theories and who have shown a willingness to lie outright in doing so.
Among those far-right voices have been numerous Republican members of Congress itself. And Rep. Barry Loudermilk's own name might sound familiar, among that crowd; Loudermilk is the House Republican who led about a dozen tourists through a tour of Capitol office buildings one day before the Jan. 6 attacks, and who was now famously caught in footage that appeared to show one of his guests taking photographs of staircases, directories, and security checkpoints along the way. That man was then seen near the U.S. Capitol the next day, boasting in a video that "there's no escape, Pelosi, Schumer, Nadler, we're coming for you."
Loudermilk, who voted on Jan. 6 to block certification of the presidential election results, had publicly dissembled about giving such a tour before the videotape that proved it was released. That's yet another reason to suspect that the House Republicans now itching to release new security footage may be more selective than they're letting on when it comes to decisions of which security footage should be released—and which tapes won't be.
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