On January 6, 2021, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson access to more than 40,000 hours of previously unreleased material from the US Capitol. McCarthy is under increasing criticism because he granted Carlson access to the film earlier this year, which led to the Jan. 6 tapes.
After his team has reviewed all of the film to address any potential security issues, McCarthy has vowed to let the public and media access to the tapes.
“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. 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,” McCarthy said. “So we’ve created the process to make that start happening.”
Rep. Clay Higgins, a Republican from Louisiana who spoke on “The Benny Show,” recently sought the footage’s release.
“I’m one of the ones pushing for the release, by the way, of all the J6 video,” Higgins said. “We got 60,000 hours of video from Jan. 4, 5, and 6 — I want it all released to the American people so that we can crowdsource that investigation.”
Several major media outlets are now putting McCarthy under further pressure to get access to the video, months after McCarthy made his pledge.
“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.
Joe Scarborough, the host of MSNBC, has also urged McCarthy to “get any January 6, 2020, Capitol riot footage back from Carlson” and distribute it for media use.
“I think the question about the January 6 tapes is a really big one,” co-host Mika Brzezinski said. What precisely occurs to those? Do they remain in his custody?
Scarborough said, “It just shows how ridiculously, outrageously irresponsible of Kevin McCarthy to send security tapes to a conspiracy theorist. Again, just mind-bending, that he sends this information to somebody who is supporting an insurrection against the United States of America and provides security tapes. That’s what any insurrectionist, future insurrectionist, would want to see. It is really it’s frightening. Kevin McCarthy needs to get the tapes back. And he needs to get lawyers to have documents signed that they’re not going to be used anywhere else in the future, or any of its contents revealed.”
Brzezinski said, “I wonder why only Kevin McCarthy has a say over those security tapes?”
Scarborough said, “It is really shocking. It puts the Capitol Hill police in danger. It puts members of Congress in danger. It puts everybody who works at the United States Capitol in danger, but he did it. Like you said, where are the tapes now?”
Earlier this month, House Republicans declared they would establish a committee to “reinvestigate” the events at the U.S. Capitol in 2021 in the same manner as the Jan. 6 committee.
Barry Loudermilk, a Republican representative from Georgia, said the new panel would “investigate both sides” and “show what really happened on Jan. 6.”
Loudermilk added that the group will think about speaking with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and discussing any choices made on Capitol security before to January 6, according to CBS News.
On January 6, 2021, House Republicans released a damning report detailing Pelosi’s involvement in security and intelligence lapses at the US Capitol.
Emails and text messages from Pelosi’s office show that her staff regularly met to discuss security detail, assisted in editing the plans of the authorities, and declined a number of requests from federal law enforcement who were required to guard the Capitol that day.
