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Three months ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that he and the GOP leadership team continued to release Jan. 6 security footage, though the videos would be slightly altered before reaching the public.
“We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day,” the Louisiana Republican said, “because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ.”
As we discussed soon after, it was a curious declaration. To hear Congress’ top Republican tell it, suspected criminals had to be protected from possible accountability, so he and his colleagues decided to take deliberate steps to obscure the identities of those who entered the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack.
That was in early December. In early March, as Roll Call reported, the House speaker has apparently changed his mind.
House Republicans will no longer blur the faces of Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol rioters in security footage posted online, Speaker Mike Johnson announced Friday. The decision reverses an earlier call to protect the identities of those who participated in the pro-Trump mob attack aimed at stopping the certification of election results.
Johnson’s change of heart coincided with the House Administration Committee releasing an additional 5,000 hours of footage on Friday, publishing the content on a website called Rumble, which as Roll Call’s report noted, is a streaming platform “known for its popularity among right-wing users.”
To briefly recap for those who might benefit from a refresher, a couple of months into his tenure as House speaker, then-Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy thought it’d be a good idea to give Tucker Carlson exclusive access to Jan. 6 security camera footage. The results were predictable: The host, before his departure from Fox News, cherry-picked footage that allowed him to tell the deceptive story he set out to tell, sparking outrage from both parties and law enforcement.
Nearly 10 months later, McCarthy’s successor decided it was time to go a step further: Johnson released thousands of hours of security footage to the public. The results were again predictable: As a New York Times report explained, the move “fueled a renewed effort by Republican lawmakers and far-right activists to rewrite the history of the attack that day and exonerate the pro-Trump rioters who took part.”
The Times added that many on the right, as if on cue, were “using the Jan. 6 video to circulate an array of false claims and conspiracy theories about the largest attack on the Capitol in centuries.”
Those efforts are ongoing, though going forward, faces will no longer be blurred. By way of an explanation, a written statement from the House speaker pointed to “significant logistic hurdles,” suggesting that the process was simply taking too long.
Whether Johnson will face far-right pushback on the decision remains to be seen, though it stands to reason conservatives won’t be pleased.
The House speaker’s written statement went on to include a quote from Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk, the chair of the House Administration’s subcommittee on oversight, who said he’s helping get to the bottom of “what really happened on January 6, 2021.”
In case this isn’t already obvious, let’s take a moment to once again note that we already know what really happened.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.