At a Capitol Hill press conference last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson boasted to reporters, “We are the rule-of-law team.” The Louisiana Republican quickly added, “The Republican Party stands for the rule of law.”
The quote came to mind anew this morning. HuffPost reported:
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Tuesday that Republicans are blurring faces in security footage from inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to protect rioters from prosecution. “We have to blur some of the faces of 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,” Johnson said at a press conference.
Oh my.
To briefly recap for those who might benefit from a refresher, a couple of months into his tenure as House speaker, Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy thought it’d be a good idea to give Tucker Carlson exclusive access to Jan. 6 security camera footage. The results were predictable: The host, before his departure from Fox News, cherry-picked footage that allowed him to tell the deceptive story he set out to tell, sparking outrage from both parties and law enforcement.
Nearly 10 months later, McCarthy’s successor decided it was time to go a step further: Johnson released thousands of hours of security footage to the public. The results were again predictable: As a New York Times report recently explained, the move has “fueled a renewed effort by Republican lawmakers and far-right activists to rewrite the history of the attack that day and exonerate the pro-Trump rioters who took part.”
The Times added that many on the right, as if on cue, are “using the Jan. 6 video to circulate an array of false claims and conspiracy theories about the largest attack on the Capitol in centuries.”
With this in mind, the House speaker was pressed this morning on the consequences of his decision.
“As you know,” Johnson told reporters, “we have to blur some of the faces of persons who…
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