Washington — House Republicans will make public most of the security footage captured on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, following through on their pledge to give Americans access to the video, they announced Friday.
Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement that 40,000 of the 44,000 hours of video from Capitol Hill taken on Jan. 6 will be posted online on a rolling basis. The faces of private citizens captured on video will be blurred to protect them from retaliation, and roughly 5% of the footage will be withheld because it contains sensitive security information, Johnson said.
"This decision will provide millions of Americans, criminal defendants, public interest organizations and the media an ability to see for themselves what happened that day, rather than having to rely upon the interpretation of a small group of government officials," Johnson said.
The speaker said that "truth and transparency are critical."
The first tranche of video, which is roughly 90 hours long, was made public Friday by the House Administration Committee. In addition to hosting the footage on a public website, there will also be a viewing room where people can watch the footage themselves.
The video footage of the assault on the U.S. Capitol that occurred on January 6 has not been widely released to the public. However, the House select committee that investigated the attack did play some portions of the footage. The committee was disbanded in December at the end of the previous Congress.
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had promised to release the security footage, but instead, he granted access to the 41,000 hours of police and surveillance video from January 6 to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Carlson then aired selected snippets of the footage, describing the events as "mostly peaceful chaos." This interpretation of the events sparked criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill, who argued that it did not accurately represent their experience when the mob of former President Donald Trump's supporters breached the Capitol building.
