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At a Capitol Hill press conference last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson boasted to reporters, “We are the rule-of-law team.” The Louisiana Republican quickly added, “The Republican Party stands for the rule of law.”
The quote came to mind anew on Tuesday morning. HuffPost reported:
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Tuesday that Republicans are blurring faces in security footage from inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to protect rioters from prosecution. “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 at a press conference.
Oh my.
To briefly recap for those who might benefit from a refresher, a couple of months into his tenure as House speaker, 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 recently explained, the move has “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, are “using the Jan. 6 video to circulate an array of false claims and conspiracy theories about the largest attack on the Capitol in centuries.”
With this in mind, the House speaker was pressed Tuesday morning on the consequences of his decision.
“As you know,” Johnson told reporters, “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 and to have other concerns and problems.”
In other words, the Republican Party’s most powerful official is concerned that if law enforcement saw the unmodified footage, the Justice Department might see evidence of criminal misconduct. In order to prevent possible accountability, Johnson and the House GOP are taking deliberate steps to obscure the identities of those who entered the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack.
It’s almost as if Johnson didn’t tell the truth last week with his boast about Republicans being “the rule-of-law team.”
HuffPost’s report added that while federal prosecutors have long had access to Jan. 6 security footage, “blurring people’s faces could prevent amateur investigators from sending tips to the FBI. Online sleuths have previously used social media and facial recognition software to help the government track down a number of suspects.”
Update: I heard from the House speaker's office, and Raj Shah, Johnson's deputy chief of staff for communications, said, “Faces are to be blurred from public viewing room footage to prevent all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any non-governmental actors. The Department of Justice already has access to raw footage from January 6, 2021.”
This post updates our related earlier coverage.