Hello, Deadline: Legal Blog readers! I had the chance on Wednesday to interview Tim Heaphy, who was the lead investigator for the House Jan. 6 committee. He weighed in on the unfolding controversy at Fox News surrounding its deceptive coverage of the 2020 election and Jan. 6, as well as the proper timeline for a potential Donald Trump prosecution, and more.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jordan Rubin: Let’s get right into it. Presumably, you’ve heard about Speaker Kevin McCarthy sharing hours of exclusive Jan. 6 footage with Tucker Carlson at Fox News. What’s your reaction to that and to Tucker’s framing of the footage?
Tim Heaphy: So first and foremost, I am not someone who has much political experience. I’ve never really worked on a congressional matter before the Jan. 6 investigation, so I’m going to leave it to others to game out McCarthy’s motivations or whether this was part of some kind of deal — I don’t have any idea about that.
What I can say is that when I heard about this, it bothered me because that is really close hold and sensitive information. When we got access to that footage, we had a dedicated terminal. It was only accessible to a couple of staff. It was password-protected. And we then had to go through the Capitol Police before we were able to publicly show any of the footage. They are very concerned about the locations of the camera coverage of the complex getting out. This is part of their proprietary information that helps them keep the Capitol safe.
This narrative that this was largely a peaceful protest with people waving flags and taking smiling selfies is just wrong. Flat-out wrong.
So there are times where we would go to them and say, “Hey, we want to use, you know, this chunk of footage,” and they’d say, “Well, can you zoom in on this?” or “Can you stop it here?” because it would show an evacuation route or it would show really clearly where the camera was embedded. And we worked with them. We had…
Read the full article here
