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.”
Yes, although someone else here pointed out to me that the Speaker actually did say he wanted faces blurred to protect those folks from DOJ, which is absurd 1) because I agree that those clowns need to face consequences, and 2) it makes no sense given that DOJ already has the raw footage.
Still, I’d hate to encourage reddit-style vigilantes even if that seems at odds with the fact that the FBI posts images explicitly looking for help in identifying certain suspects.