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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is once again having to pacify a MAGA movement meltdown after reneging on her previous promise to release unseen footage of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
In May, the Georgia Republican announced that multiple conservative journalists had been given “unfettered access” to thousands of hours of surveillance footage from the Capitol. Greene and other right-wing extremists have suggested the footage would show those who participated in the riot did nothing wrong. She said releasing the footage would provide "the transparency the American people deserve."
The MAGA movement is slowly discovering the GOP’s big reveal when it comes to Jan. 6 footage is likely all talk.
But as I’ve written previously, conservatives have grown impatient over Greene's trepidation about sharing the footage with the public. The representative has claimed she's concerned for the insurrectionists’ privacy, fearing they’d be identified by internet sleuths or others with facial recognition software. But it’s also possible she discovered this footage, depicting what is arguably the most disturbing moment in modern political history, doesn’t serve Republicans all that well as far as public opinion is concerned.
Whatever the case, Julie Kelly, a right-wing writer Greene previously said would be receiving open access to the footage, is apparently devastated by the revelation that Greene might not have been completely honest.
“The pledge by GOP to release all the Jan 6 videos has been broken,” Kelly wrote on the social media platform X on Sunday. “I believed my involvement to make footage available was a temporary fix until staff could protect innocents from DOJ and thugs like Sedition Hunters. Now I see GOP has capitulated to DOJ and Capitol police."
In other words, the MAGA movement has been had, took, hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, and run amok.
“I have lots of video,” Kelly tweeted. “And it would benefit me in many ways to keep it on close hold. But I will release what I have because this is wrong.”
Greene apparently got word of Kelly’s social media post on Monday and waffled yet again on her stance regarding sharing the footage.
“I’m all for releasing the tapes!” Greene tweeted. She repeated her previous claim that facial recognition could be used to identify some of the Capitol rioters, but put a positive spin on it this time around.
"But if they can use facial recognition, why can’t we?" she proposed. “Our patriots can find the feds and/or provocateurs who were involved in J6 that the DOJ protects.”
That “provocateur” bit — a nod to the baseless right-wing conspiracy theory that federal agents led the Jan. 6 attack— is a little piece of red meat thrown to the base.
But conservatives aren't satisfied with just a nibble when Greene essentially promised them the whole cow: hours and hours of Jan. 6 footage. And right-wingers online pounced on her remarks Monday, essentially acknowledging that her words did nothing to actually fulfill the promise she’d made.
The MAGA movement is slowly discovering the GOP’s big reveal when it comes to Jan. 6 footage is likely all talk. And watching their tantrums online, you’d have thought someone told them Santa Claus isn't real (or white).