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.