OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Republican Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Lauren Boebert of Colorado have revealed that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has agreed to release all security footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, incident at the U.S. Capitol.
“The American people deserve to know the truth about what happened on January 6th. We have demanded to see all the footage. Transparency is coming,” Gaetz said. “Every time from the JFK files to 9/11, to now January 6th. It’s our own government, our own Department of Justice that seems to stand in the way of transparency.”
He also doubled down on his call to bring more CSPAN cameras to the House floor.
“If we had cameras on the floor, my suspicion is we would have far better attendance during debates that impact the lives of our fellow Americans,” he said.
Boebert added: “Speaker McCarthy says he’ll be releasing ALL the footage from January 6th. Considering all the public has seen are edited clips from a bunch of Democrats with an axe to grind, it sure will be nice to get some unbiased footage.”
Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently praised McCarthy for promising to release 14,000 hours of video footage from the incident.
“I think the public should see what happened on that day,” McCarthy told reporters during a press conference Thursday. “I watched what Nancy Pelosi did, where she politicized it. … I think the American public should actually see what happened instead of a report that’s written for a political basis.”
“Well, yeah. After two full years, after a highly publicized and highly politicized congressional committee, after endless grandstanding in the media, after unprecedented political crackdowns, after nearly 1,000 arrests, after all of that: Americans, yes they do, have a right to know what actually happened on Jan. 6,” Carlson, an honorary member of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s board, said. “That’s what Kevin McCarthy said. Who could argue otherwise? What is the counter argument?”
“’You can’t know whether the Capitol’s surveillance cameras pan, tilt or zoom — and if you do know, America is in peril.’ It’s completely absurd. Every human movement in the United States Capitol is recorded by cameras, and you already knew that because the same is true in virtually every public building in the Western hemisphere,” Carlson said. “That is not a secret. That, of course, is not the secret the Democrats fear you might learn if you saw the tape.”
“They are probably a lot more concerned about whether you will discover how many law enforcement agents actively helped Jan. 6 protesters enter the building that day,” Carlson continued. “Some of them definitely did, we know that for a fact because we have the tape.”
WATCH:
Last week, McCarthy delivered on a previous pledge to bar three controversial Democrats from serving on powerful House committees.
McCarthy blocked Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee, saying that previous actions by both lawmakers made them unqualified to serve on such a sensitive committee.
“In order to maintain a standard worthy of this committee’s responsibilities, I am hereby rejecting the appointments of Representative Adam Schiff and Representative Eric Swalwell to serve on the Intelligence Committee,” McCarthy tweeted.
“This is not anything political. This is not similar to what the Democrats did,” McCarthy told reporters late Tuesday afternoon outside his Capitol Hill office.
Schiff, who led several Democratic investigations into Donald Trump, repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that the former president colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. Republicans have also accused him of leaking sensitive and oftentimes false information to the media several times during Trump’s term.
Swalwell, meanwhile, had a relationship with a suspected Chinese spy who helped him raise money for his 2014 campaign, though none of that was known until 2020. McCarthy says that a confidential briefing given to him by the FBI on the matter left him convinced that Swalwell is compromised and a risk to national security.
House Republicans also voted to remove Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee.
