In defending his decision to hand over security footage from the Capitol riot exclusively to Tucker Carlson, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has claimed that he is fulfilling a promise of transparency he made to voters. “I was asked in the press about these tapes,” he told The New York Times, “and I said they do belong to the American public.”
But McCarthy has hardly fulfilled that vow: The full record of security footage from the January 6 attack is still not available to the public or any members of the media aside from Carlson, who has theorized that FBI operatives orchestrated the riot as part of a conspiracy to undermine Donald Trump and frame his supporters. (The Fox News host has conducted sympathetic interviews with Capitol riot suspects; attempted to downplay the insurrection as a mere act of “vandalism”; and suggested that antifa activists might have secretly incited violence on that day.) And by granting Carlson access, McCarthy will allow his majority to cast doubt on the facts of the insurrection without having to rehash it themselves.
“Tucker is not going to spend his TV program emphasizing previously unseen acts of violence by Trump supporters,” Ford Fischer, a video journalist working to unearth a massive cache of January 6 footage, told me. “Tucker is going to put out things that are weird or counter to the narrative, which is fine. But that’s not public disclosure, that’s media relations for the Republican Party.”
Fischer’s concerns have also been echoed by top Democratic brass, like Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who has accused McCarthy of “pandering to MAGA election deniers.” As he wrote in a Wednesday letter, “The footage Speaker McCarthy is making available to Fox News is a treasure trove of closely held information about how the Capitol complex is protected and its public release would compromise the safety of the Legislative Branch and allow those who want to commit another attack to learn how Congress is safeguarded.”
The McCarthy-Carlson deal comes roughly a month and a half after McCarthy’s embattled bid for the Speakership, during which the then House minority leader promised GOP hard-liners, including Matt Gaetz, that he’d release thousands of hours of footage from January 6. (At the time, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a vocal advocate for those charged in the Capitol riot, pointed to McCarthy’s vow as one of the reasons she so fervently supported his bid.)
Thus far, a relatively small amount of surveillance footage has trickled out of federal and congressional investigations or other official avenues, including clips filed in the hundreds of cases related to the attack. Officials have previously claimed that releasing all of the footage could open the Capitol up to future security risks—a concern that Republicans seem to have forgotten about.
Caleb Ecarma
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