January 6th Footage To Be Released Under Strict Viewing Rules

This week, Republicans within the House said that security video from the U.S. Capitol break-in will be made available to the media and other approved people on January 6, 2021.

Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) was reported to have said in a statement, “House Republicans are keeping their promise to make the People’s House more open and accountable by making it easier to see the security footage from the United States Capitol on January 5th and 6th, 2021.”

In an effort to combat the “politicization” promoted by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) along with the January 6th Committee, Republican lawmakers first declared earlier this year that they would gradually start distributing over 40,000 hours of security camera footage from the Capitol attack to individual news organizations.

The Select Committee on House Admin. put out a set of rules that would let those working in the U.S. media, non-profit groups that focus on government, and lawyers for people facing charges connected to the January 6 attack send requests to see the tape.

“This is a big change from the way the Democrats ran things before, when they blocked accessibility to the footage and then only showed extremely edited clips to the general public,” Loudermilk, who chairs the oversight subcommittee of the administration committee, said.

Rules for the program say that anyone who wants to see the security tapes has to make an appointment and can only watch the tapes for a maximum of three hours at a time, which is limited to once a week. Spectators can’t record the tapes from safe computers inside the Capitol building, and the committee can only show them parts of the footage.

People in the U.S. have been asking politicians for over two years now to share the footage to the public. They are worried about how the media edits the timeline of the events.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said in May that three news sites got footage taken during the Capitol breach so that the American people could learn more about what happened on that particular day.

John Solomon, the creator of Just the News, Julie Kelly, the senior writer at the Center for American Greatness, and an unnamed third news organization were given “unfettered access” to the Capitol surveillance footage by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).

McCarthy provided the exclusive security footage to former Tucker Carlson, the Fox News anchor, first. Carlson reported on numerous tapes that showed two Capitol law enforcement officers walking with Jacob Chansley, also known as the “QAnon Shaman,” around the building.

Senator Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) demanded from the Senate floor that Rupert Murdoch, the creator of Fox News, take Carlson off the air, and reporters from several websites harassed McCarthy for providing Carlson’s crew with access to the footage.