By Team Tucker Carlson
Prosecutors lost a battle to keep some of the 14,000
hours of January 6 surveillance video that was accumulated by the FBI out of
the public view. And much to anti-Trump Democrats’ chagrin, social media is
already having a field day with it. Buzzfeed’s Zoe Tillman who broke the tough
news:
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday released a new collection
of Capitol surveillance videos from Jan. 6 after a judge ordered them to do so,
rejecting the government’s argument that making the clips public could threaten
the security of the complex.
The disclosure marks a setback for the US Capitol Police
and the US attorney’s office in their efforts to control how much footage from
the Capitol’s closed-circuit video (CCV) system gets out. In the latest case,
prosecutors argued that revealing the location and vantage points of more
cameras could help “bad actors” trying to plan some future assault on the
building. A judge concluded that argument was too speculative, however, and
that the public had a strong interest in seeing videos that formed the basis
for a recent plea deal.
US District Chief Judge Beryl Howell ordered the videos
released in response to a request from a media coalition (including BuzzFeed
News) that is petitioning judges on a rolling basis for videos that prosecutors
have relied on in Jan. 6 cases. Howell’s decision isn’t binding on other judges
in the US District Court for the District of Columbia presiding over Capitol
riot prosecutions, but it gives the media coalition a favorable ruling to point
to in future fights.
When some of this video made its way into the hands of
the public, everyone could see exactly why the prosecution didn’t want it to
get out: It doesn’t fit the narrative of the ‘deadly insurrection’ that the
fake news media has been propagating. Watch for yourself:
Of course, this is just one example clip from the footage
released. Zoe Tillman describes the gist of the newest footage release:
The clips cover a period of about 15 minutes on Jan. 6 —
between 2:25 p.m. and 2:40 p.m. — in different locations inside the Capitol.
They show rioters streaming through open doors and broken windows at an
entrance on the Senate side; crowds of people walking into the Crypt, standing
in a large crowd, and eventually dispersing; and, finally, rioters exiting as
US Capitol Police officers in riot gear gather at the Senate entrance point to
stand guard as a mob that’s outside looks in through the broken windows. There
is no audio. The cameras are stationed up high and at a distance, providing a
wide, stable perspective on the scene.
Tillman is far from a faithful narrator of the footage.
She describes the event as an “insurrection,” instead of a riot, although no
one has been charged for the “insurrection” and the FBI has not been able to
determine that there was any centralized plot to overturn the results of the
2020 election.
There was, indeed, violence in some areas of the Capitol
grounds on January 6. But it is not entirely clear that the worst offenders
were Trump supporters, rather than anomalous extremists; it appears that the
groups are all conflated into a misleading picture of what happened. There were
Trump supporters who were merely let into the Capitol building by the Capitol
police officers who were supposed to be protecting the building. Many of them
merely walked around, took pictures, and protested in a reasonably orderly
fashion. This is why many defendants are charged with crimes such as
“trespassing” and “parading without a permit.”
It also appears from a time-stamped series of videos
based on a restored Parler video archive that the Capitol protests escalated
into riots in conjunction with indiscriminate police discharge of pepper spray
and stun grenades into the crowd.
The new video release nonetheless provides more evidence
that the picture portrayed by the media, that the January 6 riot was an
existential threat to the republic, is quite demonstrably a false one. A number
of commentators drove this point home:
This isn’t even all of the videos. Who knows what other
embarrassments for the media lie in the rest of the 14,000 hours of January 6
footage?
