Republicans Are Blurring the Faces of Capitol Rioters so They Won’t Get Arrested

House Speaker Mike Johnson has promised to release more than 44,000 hours of surveillance footage from Jan. 6 to the public, with one major caveat: The faces of some individuals who participated in the storming of the Capitol, a violent attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election, will be blurred out.

In a press conference on Tuesday, Johnson said that “the release of the January 6 tapes is a critical and important exercise, we want transparency … we trust — House Republicans trust — the American people to draw their own conclusions.”

Johnson added that the party is going “through a methodical process of releasing them as quickly as we can” and that they “have to blur some of the faces of the 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 and to have other, you know, concerns and problems.”

Johnson’s office insisted in a statement to Rolling Stone that the GOP is blurring the faces of the rioters “to prevent all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any non-governmental actors,” and that “the Department of Justice already has access to raw footage from January 6, 2021.” This ignores the fact that Johnson himself said the burring was in part to protect the rioters from the DOJ.

It’s not the first time a Republican House Speaker has leveraged Jan. 6 security footage in an apparent attempt to rewrite the day’s events. In April, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy granted then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson exclusive access to the more than 40,000 hours of tapes. In turn, Carlson produced a heavily edited, cherry-picked propaganda package that claimed Jan. 6 was not a riot, but an all-but-authorized tourist visit by “orderly and meek,” concerned citizens.

“These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers,” Carlson claimed in March.

Of the more than 2,000 rioters who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, more than 1,200 have been charged with crimes related to the attack. The majority of charges are related to misdemeanor offenses like “illegal parading” and disorderly conduct. Only 446 of those charged and tried have been sentenced to prison time, and there are currently 307 pending cases awaiting trial or resolution.

The Jan. 6 riot caused more than $2.7 million in physical damage to the Capitol and over 100 law enforcement officers were injured, with one officer dying as a result of injuries sustained during the riot. Even though the attack on the nation’s seat of government was a clear attempt to undermine the American electoral process, Republicans remain committed to their efforts to protect the perpetrators.

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