Marjorie Taylor Greene has blamed liberal philanthropist George Soros and supposed concerns for Capitol security for abruptly reversing her position on releasing footage of the January 6 riot.
After previously calling for the tapes of the insurrection to be shared publicly, the Georgia congresswoman said on Friday that it could endanger the safety at the Capitol and of those who were present during the rioting but did not commit any crimes.
“If we released these video tapes just widely for the public — number one, we put the security of the Capitol at risk, because there’s over 1,700 video cameras,” she said in an interview with the right-wing Real America’s Voice channel.
“We also endanger many Americans that were simply standing on the Capitol grounds, maybe never even walked through the Capitol or committed any crimes, but they could have just walked further than where the barrier was simply because the barrier was torn down by the time they got there,” she added.
Ms Greene claimed that “Soros groups” would scour the tapes using facial recognition technology to compile evidence and hand it over to the FBI.
She added that those who committed violent crimes against law enforcement should be punished, but those that simply attended the rally didn’t deserve to be persecuted.
In a later tweet, she wrote: “Sedition Hunters would spend every second of every day analysing the videos in order to hunt innocent people that just stood on Capitol grounds on J6.”
As recently as a month ago, Ms Greene said she supported the unfettered release of footage captured on Capitol security cameras during the riot by an armed mob of Trump supporters.
“We need to release the J6 tapes to a public on line source so that everyone knows what did and didn’t happen, we need to restore fair justice, and America can move on,” she said in May.
In February, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy handed over 44,000 hours of footage to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Mr Carlson then produced a much-derided segment which sanitized the extreme violence committed against law enforcement officers, calling it “mostly peaceful chaos”.
Then last week, Ms Greene announced the footage would be handed over to right-wing commentator John Solomon, Julie Kelly, a writer at conservative website American Greatness, and a third, unnamed outlet.
Meanwhile, nine media companies including CNN, the New York Times and Politico are suing the Department of Justice under the Freedom of Information Act for the tapes to be released.
