On January 6, 2021, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson access to over 40,000 hours of previously unseen footage from the United States Capitol. McCarthy is now under increasing scrutiny because he gave Carlson, who was dismissed from Fox News on Monday, access to the footage from January 6 earlier this year.
McCarthy has promised to release the recordings to the public and media once his team has reviewed all of the footage and addressed any potential security concerns.
“This is the challenge. The Democrats told us it was only 14,000 hours of tapes, lo and behold, we take the majority and it’s 42,000 hours, so that would take me years to go all the way through. Yeah, I think the public should see what’s happened to them. We’ve worked with the Capitol Police [to] tell us about [any] section that there was a problem. And that takes a long time. But we want to make sure everybody has the opportunity to come and see what they want,” McCarthy said. “So we’ve created the process to make that start happening.”
Now, nearly a month after his promise, multiple major media outlets are exerting pressure on McCarthy to release the footage.
“Nine major media organizations have sued the Justice Department and the FBI for access to the video footage of the Jan. 6 insurrection. The nine include The New York Times, CNN, the Associated Press, and ProPublica. Public materials must be truly public. If Mr. McCarthy can give the stash to one talk show host, he can, and should, give it to every media organization and the public at large,” The Post-Gazette reported.
“That’s why the speaker must release the material to everyone. Everyone must have the chance to watch it and decide the narrative, and the more narratives we have, the better chance the public has of knowing what happened,” the outlet added.
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is also demanding that McCarthy retrieve any footage of the January 6, 2020, Capitol riot from Carlson and disclose it to the media.
Co-host Mika Brzezinski stated, “I believe the topic regarding the tapes from January 6 is a significant one. What specifically is their fate? Does he continue to possess them?”
Scarborough said, “It just shows how ridiculously, outrageously irresponsible of Kevin McCarthy to send security tapes to a conspiracy theorist. Again, just mind-bending, that he sends this information to somebody who is supporting an insurrection against the United States of America and provides security tapes. That’s what any insurrectionist, future insurrectionist, would want to see. It is really it’s frightening. Kevin McCarthy needs to get the tapes back. And he needs to get lawyers to have documents signed that they’re not going to be used anywhere else in the future, or any of its contents revealed.”
Brzezinski said, “I wonder why only Kevin McCarthy has a say over those security tapes?”
Scarborough said, “It is really shocking. It puts the Capitol Hill police in danger. It puts members of Congress in danger. It puts everybody in danger that works at the United States Capitol, but he did it. Like you said, where are the tapes now?”
The Hill says that other news organizations DEMAND access to the footage: https://t.co/DNf3xJE4iC
— 𝔾𝕖𝕟𝕖𝕒𝕝𝕠𝕘𝕪 𝔾𝕚𝕣𝕝 (@TeresaSkaggs5) April 22, 2023
The House Republicans announced last month that they will form their own committee on January 6 to “reinvestigate” the events of 2021 at the U.S. Capitol.
More on this story via Conservative Brief:
Georgia Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk will chair the new panel and says they will “investigate both sides” and “show what really happened on Jan. 6.” CONTINUE READING…
