While former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) released a portion of the surveillance footage captured on Capitol Hill during the Jan. 6, 2021, protest, his successor has gone a step further by making even more video evidence available to the public.

https://twitter.com/SpeakerJohnson/status/1725892482104164846

The response thus far has reflected a widespread belief that the actions on display by the crowd was far from the violent insurrection that many in the Democratic Party and mainstream media have consistently described it as. 

Former President Donald Trump, who is currently facing criminal charges related to his alleged role in inciting the protest, praised House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) for the latest development.

In response to the release of about 90 hours of footage in what has been described as the first of multiple tranches, Trump wrote: “Congratulations to Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson for having the Courage and Fortitude to release all of the J6 Tapes, which will explicitly reveal what really happened on January 6th.”

For his part, Johnson indicated his intention to release tens of thousands of hours of footage, withholding only about 5% of the evidence due to its inclusion of “sensitive security information related to the building architecture.”

Plenty of GOP lawmakers joined Trump in touting the release of the new tapes as further evidence that a politically motivated congressional investigation into the protest was flawed from the beginning.

“We need to investigate the J6 committee,” wrote Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). “Given the evidence they apparently suppressed, how much footage (and how many other records) do you think Nancy Pelosi and the J6 committee deliberately lost or destroyed?”

Rep. Troy Hehls (R-TX) offered a similar assessment, calling for a probe of the current and former officials on the panel.

“The J6 committee was a sham,” he wrote in a social media post. “I knew it then. Everyone knows it now. Let’s investigate the investigators.”

Broadcaster Tucker Carlson, who hosted a top-rated Fox News Channel program at the time, reacted to the limited footage he received from McCarthy earlier this year with a similar conclusion.

https://youtu.be/CV1At8Lg_1g?si=rE3tZwPPnUCnCZhy

“This tape overturns the single most powerful and politically useful lie that Democrats told us about Jan. 6,” he said of evidence that Officer Brian Sicknick was not gravely injured by a pro-Trump mob. “They lied about the police officer they claimed to revere. If they were willing to do that, then their dishonesty knew no limits.”