What does Kevin McCarthy think he’s playing at? The House speaker has given Fox News polemicist Tucker Carlson exclusive access to 41,000 hours of U.S. Capitol security footage during the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. To anyone who believes in honest transparency and the safe functioning of our legislative branch, the special handoff is as rotten as old garbage.
The principles here are elementary: Where and when CCTV images are fit for public dissemination, they should be broadly released, not sent to a single right-wing ax-grinder who for more than two years now has been minimizing the criminal attempt to disrupt the Electoral College count and spreading fever-dream conspiracy theories. In reports set to air this week, Carlson will cherry-pick from the material to serve his own narrative — a power that will be denied the rest of us, who haven’t been granted insider access to what is a definitive series of snapshots of seminal events in recent American history.
Several other TV networks, newspapers and The Associated Press have asked McCarthy for the same video and the speaker has no right to say no.
We don’t know if all the footage is fit for public consumption, and that’s where McCarthy’s move goes from crassly political to downright dangerous. New York’s Chuck Schumer, Senate majority leader, calls the release “one of the worst security risks since 9/11,” saying that unlocking the “treasure trove of closely held information about how the Capitol complex is protected” jeopardizes the safety of members of Congress and others who work in the Capitol.
While leaning on the side of transparency, that seems correct: The public’s right to know what transpired that day, expansive as it is, doesn’t extend to intricate details about where all security cameras are located, precisely how representatives and senators are protected and exactly where they go in the event of a breach.
The McCarthy-Carlson footage deal is manna from heaven for mischief makers and a right-wing fog machine eager to rewrite history. For the rest of us, it’s acid rain.
———
