Kevin McCarthy Makes Sensitive Security Footage Available to the Insurrectionists’ Propagandist

Yesterday, Mike Allen revealed that Kevin McCarthy had made all the security footage from January 6 available to Tucker Carlson.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has given Fox News’ Tucker Carlson exclusive access to 41,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from the Jan. 6 riot, McCarthy sources tell me.

  • Carlson TV producers were on Capitol Hill last week to begin digging through the trove, which includes multiple camera angles from all over Capitol grounds. Excerpts will begin airing in the coming weeks.

Why it matters: Carlson has repeatedly questioned official accounts of 1/6, downplaying the insurrection as “vandalism.”

That he did this is not a surprise. As Allen himself writes, McCarthy has been working on this since early February. And the extremists who used McCarthy’s Speakership to demand concessions have been calling for this almost from the start.

Of particular note, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who spent part of the day yesterday calling for the red states (which may no longer include Georgia) to secede, again, like the last time white supremacists grew impatient with living in an aspiring democracy, spent much of the rest of her day taking credit for the release, tying it directly to her support for McCarthy as Speaker.

Let me repeat that: The person who took credit for this release was, just two hours earlier, calling for Civil War.

And McCarthy provided access to this video to the biggest propagandist for those who attacked the Capitol. Starting almost immediately after  some of his viewers attacked the the Capitol, Tucker has been running insanely stupid conspiracy theories, claiming the attack was launched by the Deep State rather than his own viewers and allies. Tucker eventually packaged the propaganda into such a slick propaganda film, it led conservative journalists to leave.

This time around, Tucker might opt for instructing his viewers how to succeed with the next attack rather than lying about the last one.

Depending on the terms via which McCarthy made this footage available, it could also be shared with foreign adversaries. Tucker has long been chummy with Viktor Orbán, and he himself revealed he had been picked up on intercepts seeking a back channel with Russia.

The outcome of this release is hard to measure at this point.

While defendants already have access to any video to their case, when stuff gets released via an alternate channel like this, they often use it to launch new legal challenges and claims of discovery violations. At the very least, this will create new delays and headaches for already overburdened prosecutors.

The security implications, however, are more serious. I did a post in December 2021 showing how video from just one camera over the course of the day — in this case, from the Tunnel through which Joe Biden would walk to be inaugurated weeks later — would reveal where key security cameras were and how to disable them.

It’s likely that the Capitol police has replaced some of these cameras in the interim because the process of prosecuting all those who attacked the Capitol has already compromised their effectiveness.

The other thing making all the video available at once will do is identify where there aren’t (or weren’t) security cameras.

One of those places is McCarthy’s own office.

It’s bad enough that McCarthy made the unilateral decision to release these. It’s bad enough that he decided to release these to someone who, the Dominion lawsuit just revealed, was willing to undermine the democratically elected government of the country for partisan gain.

But McCarthy released them exclusively to Tucker Carlson, meaning they won’t be used to crowdsource more identifications, but will instead be used solely for the purpose of propaganda.

We have yet to get a full accounting for all the commitments McCarthy made to be elected Speaker. But this decision makes clear that he was willing to sell out the country to get the position.

Update: WaPo has a really helpful story on what this means.

The decision by McCarthy to provide the video to Carlson raised serious questions about whether the release of the footage would force U.S. Capitol Police to change the location of security cameras and why the speaker would give the material to a Fox News host who has peddled conspiracy theories about the attack and not share it with other news organizations.

McCarthy, who made numerous concessions to the far-right flank in his GOP conference to win enough votes to become speaker, has said that Republicans would investigate the work of the bipartisan Jan. 6 committee. McCarthy also vowed that Republicans would launch their own inquiry into “why the Capitol complex was not secure” on the day.

[snip]

People familiar with the video footage say that the committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection had access to a special dedicated terminal installed in the committee office that had password- protected access to the volume of footage. The committee asked for permission from U.S. Capitol police before they used any of the footage in public hearings, these people said, as they did not want to publicly disclose the location of security cameras in the building.

The committee cut and minimized use of the footage accordingly, these people added.

“We used the material that we thought was most important in demonstrating findings, and we were extremely cautious in what we chose to use,” said a former committee staffer who expressed concerns about the security risks posed by Carlson’s access to the entire trove of surveillance footage. The individual spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk freely about the internal work of the panel.

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73 replies
  1. DoctorDoom says:

    IANAL. Who, if anyone, has standing to request an injunction to stop the release of these tapes to Carlson? What is the authority that grants McCarthy full control? Does Schumer have no say, and if not, why not? Are there no checks or balances that pertain?

    • Spencer Dawkins says:

      Those are good questions.

      Just following up – I note that GOP folks were also at the Capitol in January 6, and some of them were widely known by sight, but I’d think a large chunk of the crowd would not have been able to pick out all of the GOP members to avoid assaulting them.

      Are any of these less recognizable stars ever going to figure out backing McCarthy is eventually going to get them killed?

      It only takes a handful of them to call for a new speaker and then vote for Democrat, doesn’t it?

  2. jecojeco says:

    Aren’t the tapes US government property , “things of value”, that Mac is giving to a private citizen, just one person. Theft of government property?

    They say gov documents are “over-classified”, maybe these tapes are underclassified and should be recovered by NARA & DOJ, then they can fight it in court.

    Mac is reckless and irresponsible and needs adult supervision, it’s obvious he will bend to the will of the handful of MAGA bomb-throwers in the House. When does he gift copies of nat’l security docs to Comrade Carlson? FOX is a hotbed of 5th columnists accorded free press protections.

    • FTLast says:

      I wondered about this as well. The US government is giving a thing of value to a journalist whose network will profit from it. In what way is this legal? Shouldn’t other journalists sue to have equal access?

      • Ginevra diBenci says:

        What if Nancy Pelosi had released them to Joy Reid? Or Rachel Maddow?

        I wonder what capacity McCarthy is acting under in doing this. If he’s releasing them in his capacity as speaker, what gives the House Speaker that authority and not Senate Majority (or Minority–hard to imagine McConnell cheering this move) Leader the same? Does the speaker have secret superpowers we don’t know about?

        Wish I weren’t so completely gobsmacked by this move, and even moreso by the apparent paralysis of those in what I would’ve thought were positions to respond.

  3. emptywheel says:

    In response to all questions:
    1) No, others can’t FOIA them. Congress is immune from FOIA.
    2) No, this doesn’t amount to theft of government property. McCarthy is one of a few people who determines who accesses these things.
    3) These aren’t classified at all. They’re law enforcement sensitive.
    4) If Tucker’s releases get really bad, I suppose Schumer could release his own set, to make sure actual journalists are fact-checking Tucker. Everyone seems rather flat-footed by this announcement so it may take some days or weeks to devise a response.

    • Kevin Matthews says:

      Thank you. I do appreciate the commentary. I wonder if there’s not a tension between “it’s no surprise that McCarthy did this” and “it may take some days or weeks to devise a response.” Schumer and Co. should have gone straight to the microphones to decry the dangers and the betrayal that this represents. Sensitive footage is in the wrong hands, and CNN reported one source saying that the rest of GOP leadership wasn’t told. This ought to backfire on McCarthy, but Democrats have to do their part to make it backfire

      • Rayne says:

        It’s not just on Democrats. The non-Fox, non-right-wing media has fucked up coverage for decades, quite literally. They make a pretense of both-sidesing but NEVER give Democrats equal time on an issue unless the topic is “Dems in disarray” type coverage.

        Schumer could step up to the podium and we might never learn of it. He was at the podium six days ago and I dare anyone to recall hearing a word about the subject addressed.

        No, it’s on us to use the tools we have to force the media to do their fucking jobs and hold their own accountable. Imagine what Fox News would have done had Pelosi given hearing materials to MSNBC alone. That’s the real problem: a flaccid, cowed, manipulated, pwned Fourth Estate.

    • oldoilfieldhand says:

      It is difficult to underestimate the damage the House GOP is doing to our country right now, and as sceptical as I am, I admit to being wrong about the actual purpose behind government action before.
      This incident has peaked my curiousity. Surely not even the misanthropes in the House GOP would turn over the original tapes to anyone outside of government. If I’m right, what would be the cost of reproducing 41,000 hours of cctv footage?
      Is Tucker or someone else at Fox Entertainment reimbursing the United States Government for this treasure trove of raw footage; or has the House GOP begun subsidizing our destruction by underwriting the cost of providing the leading purveyors of Russian and Chinese misinformation in the USA even more propaganda from edited, taped footage?

      • Eschscholzia says:

        There are lots of aspects to dislike about this transfer, but the cost probably isn’t one of them. The cost of duplicating 41K hours of cctv video feeds depends on the resolution, compression/codex, etc., but it is almost trivial. The storage won’t involve tapes. The digital cameras will write to a massive array of big slow hard drives in a server rack (camera output is much slower than the write speeds of even slow modern hard drives). I suspect they’ll also have a local hard drive copying/buffering the output of 4 or 8 locally connected cameras in case of failures or attacks on the internal network.

        But, figure 2GB/hr for 720×480 resolution, 4-5GB/hr for 1080P fullHD. For 41K hours, that’s only 80-200TB. If you don’t care about read/write speeds, that’s 10-20 external usb3 hard drives at 10-12TB each, roughly $200 each, copied in parallel for 2-3 days. So maybe $5K counting a technician’s time for the old school slow way; $10K if I’m off by a factor of 2. I strongly suspect that the Capitol Security folks have much better hardware. For $20-25K you could build a 2U rack fileserver to move 200TB, temporarily connecting to their network with copy speeds limited by a few ethernet connectors. [I suspect that the limited-access kiosk set up for J6 Committee staffers to watch the video was set up with some kind of stand alone file server like this.]
        What I haven’t seen reported is how much indexing information was provided: a map of camera locations by camera ID? Annotations of who and what action has been identified at each time on each camera feed? Without that, 41K hours is a pretty huge haystack to search for misleading needles, even with fast forward and 100 staffers working in parallel. Current state of the art AI could help, but not that much. Even if Fox can specify what they are looking for (not just “I’ll know it when I see it”), I would guess $500K-$1M to search the video.

        • Chuck M. says:

          “..a massive array of big slow hard drives in a server rack..”

          My work resembled that remark (till I retired).
          These aren’t college students on some Linux distro. This is the GOP, the world of Magic Money.
          Why wouldn’t there be a massive array of SSDs in a server rack? That’s 3-4 times the read/write speed.
          Now the choke point’s the net interface.

    • Gregg Moscoe says:

      “No, this doesn’t amount to theft of government property. McCarthy is one of a few people who determines who accesses these things.”

      Do you have any citations to support that? These are security tapes presumably prepared by capitol police in performance of their jobs of a) providing security to the capitol complex and b) protecting the health and lives of legislators, staff, employees, visitors to the Capitol.

      So it seems that release of these videos would be at the very least conducted with the consulting and cooperation of capital police. Not some government ideologue freelancing.

      • bmaz says:

        Uh, do “you” have any citations to the contrary to support your question? As scummy as it is, McCarthy is Speaker of the House, could do it, and he did.

  4. harpie says:

    The story has to be that ANY footage released by CARLSON & CRONIES is compromised,
    and that NOTHING he says about the footage is credible.

    • phred says:

      Agreed. I worry that the footage may be manipulated via deep fake methods to create completely fictional material for propaganda.

        • Chuck M. says:

          Sorry to disappoint, but it’s not being prepared for you, or me, or anyone who visits here.
          It’s just for a special demographic and to them, that’s all that matters.

          • Ginevra diBenci says:

            I believe harpie is referring to the stance that those of us here take in responding to this in other venues. Yes, we here see it for what it is, but that can’t stop us from taking the argument to comments at WaPo and NYT (if we can stand that, and only if necessary) and further afield, to our Tucker-besotted friends, wherever we find them.

            It can also be worthwhile to check out the Fox News website, which is not at all the same as the TV channel.

    • harpie says:

      CARLSON is a scared WHINY ASS ENTITLED CRY BABY groveling at TRUMP’s feet.

      11/12/20 CARLSON: “What [Trump]’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”

      After 1/6/21 CARLSON: [TRUMP is] “a demonic force, a destroyer.”

  5. Rugger_9 says:

    Perhaps a more useful question is whether the DoJ already has these tapes. Or, the J6SC got them while Pelosi was still Speaker, since McCarthy wouldn’t be able to stop her.

    However, as noted above, these will be selectively ‘edited’ to get the preferred content for the RWNM.

    As for MTG, she needs to be expelled, but that isn’t going to happen as long as McCarthy needs her vote.

    • Silly but True says:

      A good primer associated to this whole “who owns it,” “what’s available,” and “who got it” lines of questioning is the circa March 2021 sworn declaration of Thomas A. DiBiase, General Counsel of US Capitol Police, which was made to specifically address for federal court the nature of Capitol film footage.

      The summary: it is the US Capitol Police which maintains the system of CCTV inside and around the US Capitol (of course, the governance of the US Capitol Police goes up to the Speaker of the House, now McCarthy). At that time, DiBiase authorized the release of “over 15,000 hours” to Congressional committees and law enforcement to assist their investigations.

    • Peterr says:

      Nothing.

      This is the kind of favor businesses do for the mobster who tells them they have a nice establishment and it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.

      • Peterr says:

        I see it as yet another payment by McCarthy for being allowed to bang a gavel every now and then. He’s already made a bunch of them . . .

        Changing the rules of the House to allow a single member to call for the removal of the Speaker
        Restoring MTG et al. to their committee assignments
        Punting Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee
        Giving Jim Jordan the “investigate the investigators” perch
        Voting immediately to defund the IRS . . .

        . . . and these are just the payments off the top of my head that have been made public. These won’t end anytime soon.

        • earlofhuntingdon says:

          I see a concurrent interest Fox might have in each, but not the quid pro quo. I agree that the list of obligations McCarthy incurred to wield his tiny gavel is long. Many items on it may never become public, but we’re likely to see the consequences of them.

  6. Silly but True says:

    If Carlson is getting it, I hope it all gets released sooner than later.

    Civil Libertarians should be interested in determining whether the video proves whether there are any more “Matthew Martins” — essentially J6 tourists who on video Capitol Police explicitly waved on in, serving as official invitation into Capitol and led to Government’s attempt to prosecute him for accepting their invitation to implode in an acquittal by federal judge.

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      As with Barr and the Mueller report, this would seem to be an attempt to get ahead of and shape the narrative in a GOP and Fox friendly way, which is not good for democracy or governance.

      • Silly but True says:

        I’d rather Carlson not uniquely get it. But if he is, that’s worst of all worlds.

        Best if no one gets it, but better a public release so everyone gets it than just Carlson getting it.

    • Spencer Dawkins says:

      I would think that one problem with what has happened is that we will never know when it has “all” been released.

      Even if Schumer releases a competing set, if there are any differences, we’re stuck with dueling narratives. 🤬

    • RitaRita says:

      “If Carlson is getting it, I hope it all gets released sooner rather than later.”

      Carlson and his team are getting access to the tapes. I am certain that what that team reproduces for the Fox nation will be of little use for civil libertarians.

      Civil libertarians should hope that McCarthy gives access to the tapes to a consortium of serious journalists, not propagandists.

  7. ApacheTrout says:

    I watched an hour of Daytona on Saturday and was impressed with the numerous cameras on seemingly every car. Then the broadcast team held up one of the cameras. Truly tiny, able to be mounted just about anywhere without concern for race performance.

    Which makes me think that Congress should invest in these cameras and install them everywhere. On statues. On artwork. On light fixtures. Railings. Fire extinguishers. Everywhere. And then place more then a few dummies.

  8. harpie says:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20230221140148/https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1627695925047992320
    3:45 PM · Feb 20, 2023

    Reminder of Capitol Police’s current position on the 14,000 (not 41,000) hours of Jan. 6 footage. Also, 7,000 of it is essentially nothing (from hours that don’t include the 8-10 or so surrounding the attack) and many many hours have been released already.

    The manner of this release is also unclear. The notoriously opaque and unresponsive Capitol Police board typically votes on release of security footage, but congressional committees have long had access to Jan. 6 footage and it’s unclear if they can unilaterally release it.

    • harpie says:

      https://web.archive.org/web/20230221140756/https://twitter.com/alanfeuer/status/1627718521038700559
      5:15 PM · Feb 20, 2023

      A reminder: McCarthy’s release of Capitol Police surveillance video will have limited if any effect on J6 criminal cases for a simple reason: Defense lawyers have already had access to the footage for months and have been able to use it in motion practice and at trial.

      The release will however allow Tucker Carlson and his production team to focus on those aspects of the Capitol attack they wish to highlight.

      For months, a coalition of media outlets has been slowly and systematically using the courts to pry loose Jan. 6 footage. So far, this has been the best–in fact, the only–way of making public as much video from Jan. 6 as possible.

      • Just Some Guy says:

        Also from Kyle Cheney yesterday:

        https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1628164192107724800

        ‘A lot of people are getting one thing wrong: Tucker Carlson doesn’t “have” any Jan. 6 footage. He hasn’t “obtained” it. His people are viewing it on a terminal in the Capitol and it’s unclear when he’ll get permission to air any of it, let alone lots of it’

        Not entirely reassuring but hey.

  9. Peterr says:

    If I were the security person who was the last line of defense for the doors of the House, who fired the shots that killed Ashley Babbitt, I’d be very worried about this. The J6C and other oversight folks cleared this person of any wrongdoing, but the way in which the right wingers have declared Babbitt to be a martyr suggests to me that they *really* want to doxx this person and make his/his family/his friends lives a living hell.

    Or worse.

      • Sloth Sloman says:

        I’d say this still brings a great deal of risk if the frothers and Carlson are able to replay the shooting over and over from various angles and cherry pick details to make it seem like he did something he didn’t do.

        At the end of the day, obviously he was defending the Capitol from a blatant attack. But we aren’t dealing with reasonable people anymore, and this sort of thing is the “evidence” they are looking for to get violent. It will revive a particular point of fury that may have fallen out of their consciousness over time.

        • Matt___B says:

          I woudn’t be at all surprised if they started to make use of ChatGPT-style AI learning technology to generate ever-crazier narratives to further their general propaganda efforts. Combine that with deep-fake video capabilities based on real video and hitch it with malign political aims and presto! The guardrails on this type of technology, of which warnings are already starting to appear, will be discarded in the ditch. It ain’t all about helping students to write term papers, job-seekers to write better cover letters or untalented writers to produce more-acceptable screenplays…

        • Ginevra diBenci says:

          Carlson will get to play the Costner role in his own “JFK”–as we know, and Tucker makes bank on, video can be edited to show anything, even without AI.

          Trump has tried to make himself the leader of the charge against Byrd, claiming Ashli Babbitt as a martyr and cloaking his own victimhood in hers. Irony is very dead, but the spectacle of these Back The Blue parasites gunning for a law enforcement officer for doing his damn job truly sickens us all.

    • Dark Phoenix says:

      You may be right, but I expect this to be more like “Where’s Waldo?”, except it’s going to be “Where’s Ray Epps (or any other “instigators” Tucks wants to “point out”)?”…

    • Frank Probst says:

      Minor point, but it was a shot (singular), not shots (plural). He fired one shot into a mob trying to get past an obviously-barricaded door. That was all it took to stop (or at least slow) the mob from getting through the door. That needs to be pointed out over and over and over. The amount of restraint shown by law enforcement that day borders on miraculous. It could have been a bloodbath, and it wasn’t, because law enforcement kept it from becoming one.

  10. Savage Librarian says:

    In case you missed it, some excerpts from a story by Shirin Ali on 2/19/23, about the Architect of the Capitol (AOC):
    …..
    “President Biden fired the head of a federal agency—the architect of the capitol, Brett Blanton—over some pretty wild alleged misdeeds.”
    …..
    “While the Capitol was closed due to COVID, Blanton’s wife posted on social media appearing to invite people in for tours. “This is happening!!!” she wrote on Sept. 30, 2020, alongside a photo of the two of them in front of the Capitol Building. “All PATRIOTS welcome…PM Me.” She captioned another photo from the same day with: “Contact me for a private tour. All PATRIOTS accepted!”

    “Though posting to social media isn’t technically in violation of U.S. code, offering private tours of the Capitol creates “the appearance of impropriety and using a public position for private gain, which is a violation of AOC policy,” the OIG report said.”

    “Blanton also admitted to giving tours while the Capitol was closed—but only to lawmakers who requested one.”
    …..
    “In a rare moment of bipartisanship, Republicans and Democrats came together to call for Blanton’s firing….”

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/02/why-biden-fired-architect-of-the-capitol-brett-blanton.html

  11. Doctor My Eyes says:

    Observers continue to cast these deeply unsettling events as being motivated by immediate gains, countering certain narratives or promoting others. At some point, isn’t it time to see these events as part of a concerted, sustained assault on the US government?

    • Benvindo Soares says:

      Great point . Commerce via Rupert seems to be picking away at Democracy. If only there was a clause…

  12. Randy Baker says:

    Perhaps there will be a small silver lining to this. Some of the folks at Fox, or other seditionists with whom they share the material, may proceed without consulting counsel and follow their bliss, to wit: cast persons in a false light and thus position themselves to lose a serious defamation suit.

  13. Tim_21FEB2023_1259h says:

    Moving files from the J6 MAM to Tucker’s production environment will be a process to keep an eye on. Metadata is likely to get lost in endless clipping.

    If Tucker decides to offer the footage they select and extract, to FNC, and Fox actually brings it into the News Channel media servers, it might open a can of worms for the busy Fox News Legal dept. They certainly won’t want 14k or 41k hours of footage in house.

    Giving it to the Pool would probably be the easiest answer to a hot potato. The Bureau Chief is the liaison with the Pool.

    [Welcome to emptywheel. Please choose and use a unique username with a minimum of 8 letters. We are moving to a new minimum standard to support community security. Because your username is far too short and common it will be temporarily changed to match the date/time of your first known comment until you have a new compliant username. Thanks. /~Rayne]

    • jecojeco says:

      I wonder what other gov records Mac can party-favor to Comrade Carlson.

      If I was Newsmax or OAN I’d be pissed that I didn’t get preferential treatment too. They’re never shy about outfoxing Fox.

      Mac is checking off all the loose cannon boxes!

      • Sloth Sloman says:

        OAN and Newsmax can bitch and out-flank Fox to the right as much as they want, but they’re getting booted off Direct TV and don’t/won’t have the reach that Fox does.

  14. Benvindo Soares says:

    Tucker is gonna tuck. I reckon I will sit back and watch the show.

    This will not end well for him.Imho. The online video slueths (internationally) will dessimate him and Fox in real time with receipts. Putin himself wouldn’t kick this bee’s nest …. there is no spin to be gleaned….

    In my best Obama ; ” …proceed Govnah “

  15. klynn says:

    In the last few days (not in chronological order):
    1) Dominion summary judgement – Fox’s MO fully revealed with evidence, Trumo’s MO reveled as well.
    2) Ex Rand Pail aide, grandson-in-law charged with funneling RU $ in election.
    3) Rand Paul and Tulsi Gabbard do their anti-war propaganda event.
    4) Putin escalates war.
    5) Pressures put on Ukraine to fold, no pressure put on RU in the media.
    6) Major decisions and sentences for key J6 folks.
    7) Trump legal woe as appeals denied and contempt enforced
    7) Biden is revealed to have taken secret trip to Ukraine on President’s Day!
    8) RU war crimes discussion with Int’l orgs
    9) McCarthy release J6 footage.
    10)More anti-war stunts that favor Putin, like Code Pink.
    11)O’Keefe, Project Veritas news & DOJ.
    12) Twitter miss information campaign through file dump by Elon and labelled full transparency by Taibbi.

    There are more items that could be listed. The point is, there is a common thread woven through this list. It might be more effective to make the list chronologically and explain the common threads with each item.

    Sadly, the media is blind and not asking the correct questions on anything listed above. Tucker must be loving his access and the failure of the MSM favoring him and GOP shell games.

  16. FL Resister says:

    Now that the Dominion lawsuit is public, and explicit details of all of the top Fox news hosts admitting to each other they are directly lying to their viewers repeatedly about the 2020 election, then cannot they be repeatedly hit over the head for their lack of credibility at the very least.

    And if the sitting Speaker of the House turns over government video recordings of the Jan 6 mobsters inside the Capitol Building in a violent culmination of the coordinated disinformation effort by Trump and his backers to overthrow the 2020 US presidential election to that entity in particular, is there no recourse for that?

  17. David F. Snyder says:

    I’m not quite sure how yet, but this will backfire on the GOP. Though, it will be painful to arrive at that point.

    • Stephen Calhoun says:

      [imo] My sense is that this joins the short list of stuff that is positioned to backfire. Outside of TFG, recent and upcoming GQP residential candidates must be asked:

      (1) Was Trump the actual winner of the 2020 election?

      (2) Was January 6th an illegal attempt to obstruct and deny the certification of the election?

      (3) If you could make it so, would you like to see every last legal voter: vote?

      (4) Is there a deep state being used by Satan to end the republic?

      This last question is snarky yet it reflects a belief that is popular among ‘evangelical’ extremists/eliminationists.

  18. Andy Kayton says:

    Poisoning of the jury pool and jury nullification — all MAGA world needs is one Fox viewer on a jury panel. After Tucker’s indoctrination of FOXNation, a greater number of potential jurors (even in D.C.) will carry a predisposition or suspicion that federal prosecutors aren’t telling the whole story and are deliberately omitting all the evidence the juror saw before their very own eyes (!) on Carlson’s show.

    If Carlson provokes public disorder and violence, as I fear, that will magnify the intensity of belief and solidify the intractability of MAGA tribe members.

    Jury nullification needs to be taken seriously on Trump-related prosecutions. Paul Manafort was convicted in 2018 on only 8 of 18 counts due to a single juror-nullifier. The risks of jury nullification are much higher, I think, in the aftermath of the 2020 election and the attack on the Capitol.

  19. Tom-1812 says:

    I’m not so sure Mr. Carlson will have an easy time of it trying to make a silk purse out of the sow’s ear that I’m sure is the totality of the January 6th footage. First, there were all the millions of eyes that witnessed the insurrection online or on TV as it happened that day, hour after grueling hour. We all have memories of where we were and what we were doing that afternoon, as well as the emotional reactions we felt, as we watched the mounting violence taking place on our home screens: the clashes at the barricades outside the Capitol as the outnumbered police tried vainly to “Hold the line!”, the mob smashing doors and windows to get inside the building, the screams of the police officer trapped in the doorway, the claustrophobic horror of the frenzied mob of people jammed in the tunnels, and the sight of the gallows and the chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” There’s no way to unsee or unhear all that, and we’ve had over two years and repeated viewings to let it all sink in. I’d say that for the vast majority of Americans, that’s what happened on January 6, 2021, that’s what January 6th means to them. And I’m sure that includes Kevin McCarthy as well.

    It may not be difficult for Mr. Carlson to find some shots or perhaps even extended footage of empty hallways, or mob members ambling about inside the Capitol talking to police officers, smiling and posing for pictures, and otherwise behaving as “tourists” or frat boys at a college hazing. But none of that will be able to obviate or obscure the scenes of violence and mayhem that WE KNOW took place that day because WE SAW THEM HAPPEN!

    Mr. Carlson might as well announce: “While it’s true that an Imperial Japanese Task Force was blown off-course near the Hawaiian Islands and accidentally sent some aircraft flying over Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, the real story of the so-called Day of Infamy is to be found in these home movies of surfers at Waikiki Beach.”

  20. Frumpbe says:

    DoctorDoomsays (February 21, 2023, 5:43 am) question concerning K. McCarthy”s authority to provide J6 footage to anyone is important & needs to be answered.
    Again, by what authority does the current Speaker of the House, Rep. K. McCarthy, claim to have that allowed him to release over 40,000 hours of the J6 insurrection video footage to anyone or group?

  21. Hug h roonman says:

    Since this News hit I’ve yet to hear a single Reporter/Journalist on NPR, CNN, NBC etc. frame the McCarthy J6 video release to Tucker in the context of the recent Dominion- Carlson, Ingraham, Hannity revelations.
    How is that even possible?
    They were caught red handed knowing full well that the “Stolen Election” was BS and yet continued to AMPLIFY Trumps lies.
    Going forward every MSM mention of FOX, Hannity, Carlson and Ingraham should include the FACT that they lied to their audience and undermined our Democracy… for PROFIT!
    (Not holding my breath)

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