House Republicans are pumping the brakes on the release of Jan. 6 surveillance footage they’ve offered to Fox News host Tucker Carlson and going on offense against Democrats who have spent the past week slamming the move.
Republican leaders are emphasizing that no clips will be broadcast without prior security clearance while accusing Democrats of neglecting the same precautions during the investigation by the House select committee last year — a charge the Democrats quickly rejected.
Carlson, Fox’s wildly popular conservative pundit, said last week that he would begin airing footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot this week, after Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) offered him what Carlson described as “unfettered” exclusive access to more than 40,000 hours of unreleased surveillance tape starting earlier in the month.
Yet McCarthy and other Republicans, following days of silence on the topic, made clear Tuesday that no information would be released to Carlson’s team — let alone broadcast publicly — before the footage is screened to ensure it doesn’t compromise the security of the Capitol complex.
The Speaker said Republicans are working with the U.S. Capitol Police to ensure that’s the case.
“It’s many more hours of tape than we were ever told. They said at the beginning it was like, 14,000 hours. There’s roughly almost 42,000 hours. We’re working through that. We work with the Capitol Police as well, so we’ll make sure security is taken care of,” McCarthy told reporters in the Capitol.
“There’s certain parts that he wanted to see,” McCarthy said of Carlson, but stressed that the Fox News host’s team specifically said they do not want to see “exit routes.”
“They’re not interested in it. They don’t want to show that,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy’s statement was a shot at the Jan. 6 select committee for airing footage showing then-Vice President Mike Pence leaving the Senate chamber after rioters stormed into the Capitol in a failed effort to prevent Congress from certifying President Biden’s election victory.
The footage did not show Pence’s full route out of the Capitol, and members of the investigative committee said they took pains to clear each video clip with leaders of the Capitol Police before broadcasting them.
“What we showed to the public was video that we vetted through general counsel, we vetted through the chief of the Capitol Police,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the since-dissolved Jan. 6 committee, told reporters Tuesday. “And under no circumstances did we push out anything that we felt that would have violated any aspect of the security of this area.”
McCarthy, though, cast doubt on the Democrats’ narrative, saying members of the Capitol Police force have informed him directly that not all footage from the Jan. 6 select committee was screened.
“There’s times when the Capitol Police told me that they didn’t consult with them either on some of these routes, so that’s a concern,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy said that he expects the security footage to be widely released “as soon as possible,” but would not “predetermine” the format of such a release.
McCarthy told The Hill that he has not spoken personally to Carlson about the Jan. 6 footage.
McCarthy also criticized the Jan. 6 select committee for airing clips that showed his staff members being evacuated from his office wing.
“They went in and they showed our office … because they have a camera in our office. They never talked to any of us about it,” said McCarthy, who did not cooperate with the Jan. 6 select committee after it issued a subpoena to question him.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) also raised concerns about footage released by the Jan. 6 select committee, pointing to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) daughter filming a documentary in a secure location where congressional leaders were kept during the riot.
