House Speaker Mike Johnson has promised to release more than 44,000 hours of surveillance footage from Jan. 6 to the public, with one major caveat: The faces of some individuals who participated in the storming of the Capitol, a violent attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election, will be blurred out.
In a press conference on Tuesday, Johnson said that “the release of the January 6 tapes is a critical and important exercise, we want transparency … we trust — House Republicans trust — the American people to draw their own conclusions.”
Johnson added that the party is going “through a methodical process of releasing them as quickly as we can” and that they “have to blur some of the faces of the persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against, and to be charged by the DOJ and to have other, you know, concerns and problems.”
Eh, witch hunts are a big risk in the immediate aftermath when crowd tension is the highest. It has been three years, at this point I expect the sleuth work on suspect identification would be all upside.
The bigger security concern is sleuths figuring out all the camera locations and, by deduction, the blind spots. Johnson is setting up the next Congress to be much more vulnerable to violent attack.
If there’s anyone with a lick of sense in the Congressional security team, they’ve added or moved cameras specifically for this reason. If I was on that team, January 7th I’d be pushing to add more cameras/defenses, given how close it was as is.