After a two-day radio silence in the wake of the news breaking that Fox News host Tucker Carlson was allowed to access tens of thousands of hours of January 6 U.S> Capitol surveillance footage, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has finally shattered the silence about the reasoning for his making the disclosure.
“I promised,” explained McCarthy this past Wednesday to The New York Times. “I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment.”
Just last month, the speaker stated that he was looking to finally release the tapes due to the “politicization” he thought had been created by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the January 6 Committee, which put extreme focus on former President Donald Trump throughout its investigation and in its final report, but McCarthy refused to speak up about how he was planning to do so.
This past Monday, Axios was the first to report on the fact that McCarthy reached out to share with Carlson close to 41,000 hours of surveillance footage from the events of January 6, 2021, when a group of people stormed the U.S. Capitol building, disrupting legislators that were in the process of meeting to certify the 2020 election win of President Joe Biden.
A few hours later, Carlson explained on his show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” that members of his team have been granted what they think to be entirely “unfettered” access to the footage, and he plans to start sharing what they discovered at some point next week.
“Some of our smartest producers have been there looking at this stuff, trying to figure out what it means and how it contradicts, or not, the story that we’ve been told for more than two years,” stated Carlson. “We think already that in some ways it does contradict that story.”
Tucker Carlson Announces That His Show Has Been Granted Access To 44k Hours Of Footage From January 6th
"We believe that access is unfettered. We believe we have secured the right to see whatever we want to see."
"We're going to spend the rest of this week taking a look at it,… https://t.co/sK7691S0n8 pic.twitter.com/GnPvtbENg5
— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) February 21, 2023
A number of Republicans lauded the move, including Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who previously stood against McCarthy’s ascension to speaker earlier this year. “Thank you [McCarthy] for following through on this!” she expressed via social media. “The public deserves to see everything that was hidden.”
However, silence on the issue from McCarthy ended up giving the Democrats quite a bit of room to shout out a number of fearmongering statements about the nature of this particular disclosure and the risks to capitol security it could impose without any pushback.
As part of a letter sent out Tuesday to House Democrats, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) explained that his team was “working to confirm the precise nature of the video transfer,” which he labeled as a “reported breach,” and claimed that there was “no indication” that McCarthy and Carlson had abided by the same protocols utilized by the January 6 Committee in handling the footage.
