Wednesday, a group of news organizations filed a lawsuit to get access to security footage from the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, that was given only to Fox News.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) gave about 44,000 hours of surveillance footage to Fox News host Tucker Carlson earlier this year. Carlson played parts of the video on his show while questioning the importance of the attack and calling it “mostly peaceful chaos.”
The media organizations also tried to get the footage from McCarthy. They also asked the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys’ administrative office to speed up Freedom of Information Act requests to get the video.
“Plaintiffs have continued to press the Speaker’s Office for access to the videos as soon as possible and on the same terms as other media requestors,” the lawsuit says. “However, the Speaker’s Office has refused to even give a timeline for when such access might start.”
The lawsuit says that the federal agencies have not given the requested footage. It asks a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to force them to do so. The request is for all closed-circuit video camera footage from Jan. 6 at the Capitol.
The above statement is referring to a lawsuit in which the plaintiffs are claiming that they have been denied access to certain videos related to the Capitol riot.
The plaintiffs allege that this denial of access is a significant departure from their previous experience, as they have spent the past two years actively and successfully obtaining access to thousands of videos related to the riot, which have been used as evidence in numerous court cases in the same district.
When McCarthy gave the footage to Fox, Democrats were angry and raised security worries. The U.S. Capitol Police said that they only looked at one clip from Carlson’s March 6 show.
Last month, reporters asked McCarthy if he regretted letting Carlson in. “No,” he said. “Right from the start, I said, “Let’s be honest.” So, what I said is exactly what I wanted to give to everyone. People could look at it and see what had happened that day.
