The top Republican on the House committee which oversees the US Capitol Police is calling for the release of surveillance video he says disproves Democratic claims that GOP members gave “reconnaissance tours” before the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol.
In a Thursday letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Illinois Representative Rodney Davis said Capitol security footage recorded during the “relevant period” — which he claimed to have reviewed — “does not support ... Democrat accusations about so-called ‘reconnaissance’ tours”.
The “accusations” referred to by Mr Davis date to last January, when 34 Democrats — led by Representative Mickie Sherill —signed a letter to members of the Capitol Police Board asking for a probe into “suspicious behavior” by Republican member-led tour groups on 5 January 2021, the day before a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol in hopes of preventing Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
At the time, Ms Sherill, a US Navy veteran, wrote that she and many of her co-signers who had been “trained to recognize suspicious activity” in the military “witnessed an extremely high number of outside groups in the complex” on the eve of the attack and had reported them to the House Sergeant-at-Arms because they were “unusual” due to the Capitol’s coronavirus restrictions.
She also noted that many in the mob who attacked the Capitol “seemed to have an unusually detailed knowledge” of the labyrinthine Capitol complex, which has a complex tunnel system connecting the Capitol, the House and Senate office buildings, and the Library of Congress.
Representative Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House select committee investigating the 6 January insurrection, told The Washington Post last month that the committee has evidence that members aided or abetted the violence that day and was reviewing “a lot of film” from the day of the attack.
But Mr Davis, the ranking member on the House administration committee, said releasing that “film” would put an end to speculation about whether any Republican members aided insurrectionists by helping them learn to navigate the Capitol before the attack.
He also said it would be possible for Ms Pelosi to order the footage released without harm to ongoing investigations because House Democrats used selected portions of footage during their presentation to the Senate during Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial last year.
“The only way for you to stop the spread of Democrat misinformation about January 6 ‘reconnaissance’ tours is to release all of the relevant security footage,” he said. “We call on you to release all of the footage immediately to set the record straight and allow the American people to judge for themselves the merits of these Democrat allegations”.
A spokesperson for Ms Pelosi, Drew Hammill, toldThe Independent any decisions about the release of Capitol security footage are made by the Capitol Police — not the Speaker.
“We’re sorry that Rep. Davis thinks he needs to act like a lunatic in order to win his Republican primary,” he said. “But as he knows, the Speaker’s Office does not house the security footage from the US Capitol”.
