The Daily Escape:
Poppies beginning annual super bloom, Chino Hills, CA – February 2023 photo by Road to Something New
Mike Allen of Axios reported on Monday that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had made all the Capitol security footage from January 6 available to FOX’s Tucker Carlson:
“House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has given Fox News’ Tucker Carlson exclusive access to 41,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from the Jan. 6 riot, McCarthy sources tell me. Carlson TV producers were on Capitol Hill last week to begin digging through the trove, which includes multiple camera angles from all over Capitol grounds. Excerpts will begin airing in the coming weeks.”
Yes, it’s the same Tucker Carlson who repeatedly questioned official accounts of Jan 6, downplaying the insurrection as “vandalism.” It’s also the same guy who, in Dominion Voter Systems’ lawsuit against FOX News, was shown to be lying to his viewers about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
Carlson’s producers are already going through the videos. They will be looking for footage of insurrectionists that will support the MAGA contention that the insurrectionists actually were tourists who simply had lost their way. It seems likely that Carlson’s team will selectively edit the footage to paint a picture that Jan 6 couldn’t have possibly been an insurrection. If you doubt this is his intent, Mike Allen also reports that:
“Carlson last year called the attack an ‘outbreak of mob violence, a forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards.’”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) a member of the Jan. 6 committee, said this:
McCarthy granted access to non-public materials about the insurrection to an amoral propagandist who constantly misrepresented the facts about both the 2020 election and the Jan. 6th insurrection.
Giving Carlson this access to the materials may be within McCarthy’s purview, but the videos actually belong to the American people. So why can McCarthy grant “exclusive access” to Carlson? If the idea is to achieve more transparency, then all news organizations (and the American public) should be able to view them, not merely a political hack like Carlson.
In one sense, McCarthy’s doing this shouldn’t be a surprise. The extremists who extracted concessions during McCarthy’s campaign for the Speakership have been calling for this almost from the start of the J6 Committee’s work.
And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who spent time yesterday calling for the red states to secede:
She then spent the rest of her day taking credit for the video release to Fox:
Let’s repeat that: The person taking credit for pushing McCarthy to make this release, was calling for “a national divorce” (civil war to the rest of us) two hours earlier. It all sure sounds legit.
Here’s some background on how the Committee handled these videos when they were conducting investigations. Compare that to handing them over to FOX. From the WaPo:
“People familiar with the video footage say that the committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection had access to a special dedicated terminal installed in the committee office that had password- protected access to the volume of footage. The committee asked for permission from U.S. Capitol police before they used any of the footage in public hearings, these people said, as they did not want to publicly disclose the location of security cameras in the building.”
More:
“The committee cut and minimized use of the footage accordingly, these people added. ‘We used the material that we thought was most important in demonstrating findings, and we were extremely cautious in what we chose to use,’ said a former committee staffer who expressed concerns about the security risks posed by Carlson’s access to the entire trove of surveillance footage.”
So don’t say McCarthy didn’t have a choice. He undoubtedly felt pressure to release the raw footage to FOX, but he could have done that on a government server allowing all news services to comb through it, as well as the public.
He went to Carlson because he needs to satisfy his extremist Republican Congressional members.
We need to learn whether the DoJ already has copies of these tapes. We know that McCarthy’s release of Capitol Police surveillance video will have limited effect on the current J6 criminal cases because defense lawyers have already had access to the footage for months and have been using it in existing cases at trial.
Tucker is gonna tuck around.
Democrats and any other defenders of democracy had better get ahead of the FOX narrative. Like Biden just got ahead of Putin’s spring Ukraine offensive.
Because we know what’s coming.
We lie to ourselves about the nature of our government. We always have. So states rights have not created a laboratory of democracy, rather states right have been used to support oppression of minorities. Nor have we a marketplace of ideas. We could have – but the marketplace is dominated by the intellectual equivalent of soda and snacks.
Nor did placing Congress on TV (via CSPAN) make for more democracy. Now most speeches are performance art delivered to an empty chamber.
The original split between the original slave states and the North remains – with the South gaining more allies.
Unless the people who don’t understand that they are being lied to come to their senses, we are lost.
Which member of Congress, dead or alive, is the bigger scumbag: Joe McCarthy or Kevin McCarthy?