Last month, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., announced that the House would release more than 40,000 hours of internal security video taken during the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. But during a news conference on Tuesday, Johnson clarified that those tapes won’t be entirely unedited. “We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” Johnson said.
In making the tapes public, Johnson was acting to protect himself from the fury of the far right.
As my colleague Steve Benen quickly pointed out, Johnson’s statement positions him as defending the people in the security camera video from potential arrest for any crimes they committed that day. It’s worth taking a step back, though, to look at how Johnson’s two choices — to release the tapes and to blur the faces of participants — were fueled by two distinct desires. In making the tapes public, he was acting to protect himself from the fury of the far right. But in blurring their faces, Johnson is in essence protecting these rioters from themselves.
At the most obvious level, Johnson’s statement alone speaks volumes about his absurd claim that the Republican Party “stands for the rule of law.” But there’s a certain internal logic to it when you consider that since former President Donald Trump first clashed with former FBI Director James Comey, the MAGA right has accused the FBI and the Justice Department more broadly of being anti-conservative and having been illegally “weaponized” to target Trump supporters. For most MAGA supporters, then, there’s no disconnect between support for law enforcement and opposition to the Justice Department’s efforts.
As far as hindering the investigations directly, blurring the tapes made publicly available does little to impede prosecutors. The Justice Department has had access to this video for years now. What it does do, though, is hinder the dedicated amateur sleuths who have scoured videos and pictures taken that day to identify faces in the crowd that might otherwise have eluded the feds. NBC News’ Ryan J. Reilly has written extensively about these “sedition hunters,” whose efforts have led to tips that resulted in rioters’ arrests and eventual prosecutions.
While Johnson helped lead the effort in the House to reject certifying the 2020 election results, I have real doubts that he had any real interest in releasing these tapes before he became speaker. Despite his sterling credentials as an election denier, Johnson hasn’t been an apologist for the Jan. 6 rioters in the same way some of the more outspoken members of the far right have been. He’s never, for example, called them “political prisoners,” as Trump did in a video praising Johnson’s choice to release the tapes. He also didn’t pressure his predecessor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to make the video public after the latter handed over Jan. 6 video to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
While Johnson helped lead the effort in the House to reject certifying the 2020 election results, I have real doubts that he had any real interest in releasing these tapes before he became speaker.
Nor has Johnson argued, as many promoting debunked conspiracy theories have claimed, that there is some kind of exculpatory evidence buried amid the hours of video. Soon after the first tranche became public, the likes of Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., were falsely asserting that there was evidence that federal agent provocateurs were present to instigate the rioters. Others have claimed that discrete images of protesters’ aimlessly wandering the Capitol shows that the day was actually peaceful, ignoring other video of those same people at other times attacking police officers or otherwise causing mayhem.
“We want the American people to draw their own conclusions,” Johnson said on Tuesday. “I don’t think partisan elected officials in Washington should present a narrative and expect that it should be seen as the ultimate truth.” I understand why he wants to undermine the findings of the House Select Committee on Jan. 6, but these tapes are raw data that are easily cherry-picked or presented without context. The result might convince some Trump fans that they’re now getting the supposed full picture that Democrats wanted to hide from them. But it won’t change what actually happened that day.
So why did Johnson bother to release the tapes at all? The short answer is “because far-right members would be mad if he didn’t.” While he took up the speaker’s gavel with their blessing, that luster faded when he worked to pass a short-term spending bill with mostly Democratic votes, same as McCarthy did before his ouster. And, keeping the similarities going, Johnson has opted to follow McCarthy’s strategy for distracting the hounds nipping at his heels: toss as much red meat as possible. Much as he’s hyped the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden despite previously not caring much about it, he opted to release the Jan. 6 video to show the MAGA crowd that he’s still with them.
Now, if Johnson knows that there’s nothing that will help the people who are clamoring for the tapes to be released, he couldn’t say as much. He also couldn’t continue to sit on them as long as the attacks from his right were still incoming. Blurring the video to keep the tapes from actively hurting the people calling for their release was his form of compromise, since it was clear that they hadn’t thought that far ahead themselves.
