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Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has honored his promise to release of thousands of hours of footage from the incident at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In a series of tweets, Greene said Republicans provided “unfettered access” to the 1/6 tapes to specified members of the press, claiming those media figures would be reporting on the tapes in the coming days.
“I’m excited to share the good news that just as I promised the J6 tapes are being released!” Greene tweeted. “[House Speaker Kevin McCarthy] has given [journalist John Solomon], [journalist Julie Kelly], and a third outlet unfettered access to the J6 tapes, and their reporting on it starts tomorrow. This is the transparency the American people deserve and I look forward to their reporting!”
Earlier this year, McCarthy released over 40,000 hours of unseen footage from the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who spent several days airing footage on his program.
McCarthy released the tapes in the media and promised to give the public access to them after his team reviewed all of the footage to address any potential security concerns.
Greene said that will be happening as soon as the end of this week.
I’m excited to share the good news that just as I promised the J6 tapes are being released!@SpeakerMcCarthy has given @jsolomonReports, @Julie_kelly2, and a third outlet unfettered access to the J6 tapes, and their reporting on it starts tomorrow.
This is the transparency the…
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) May 31, 2023
“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,” McCarthy told reporters in April. “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,” he said. “So we’ve created the process to make that start happening.”
House Republicans are also launching their own version of a Jan. 6 committee that will “reinvestigate” what happened at the U.S. Capitol in 2021.
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.”
Loudermilk also declared that the panel would consider seeking an interview with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, including any decisions made about Capitol security ahead of Jan. 6, CBS News reported.
House Republicans issued a scathing report exposing Pelosi for her role in security and intelligence failures at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Emails and text messages from Pelosi’s office reveal her staff held regular meetings discussing security detail, helped edit authorities’ plans, and turned down several requests from federal law enforcement needed to protect the Capitol on that day.
“Days after Pelosi’s Jan. 6 select committee recommended insurrection charges against former president Donald Trump over the Capitol riot, Republicans have hit back with a counter-investigation apportioning blame for the internal security breakdown on Jan. 6 to Pelosi and a dysfunctional Capitol Police intelligence division,” New York Post reported.
The New York Post reported:
House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving, who answered to Pelosi as one of three voting members of the Capitol Police Board, “succumbed to political pressures from the Office of Speaker Pelosi and House Democrat leadership,” was “compromised by politics and did not adequately prepare for violence at the Capitol.”
Pelosi and her staff “coordinated closely” with Irving on security plans for the Joint Session of Congress on Jan. 6, but Republicans were deliberately left out of “important discussions related to security.”
And, in an apparent attempt to hide from Republicans the fact that they were being excluded from discussions, Irving asked a senior Democratic staffer to “act surprised” when he sent “key information about plans for the Joint Session on Jan. 6, 2021, to him and his Republican counterpart.”
The report also claims that “staff within the House Sergeant at Arms office emailed Paul Irving that January 6th was Pelosi’s fault,” although it provides no evidence for the assertion.
