McCarthy vows to release full January 6 footage to the public

In an interview released by Breitbart on Thursday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said that he intends to make the nearly 50,000 hours of Capitol riot footage gathered by security cameras on January 6 available to the public.

Addressing why he chose to release the tapes to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, McCarthy said, "This is all about transparency, and it won’t just be to Tucker."

"Like any news organization, different people get exclusives. We watched during the January 6, CNN would have exclusives all the time and nobody can play — CNN actually got to be in the center of the Statuary Hall for a whole hour for their show," he said. "You’ve watched that January 6 would release only certain tapes."

"I think it’s better for transparency that anyone can make their own decisions, and as we walk through these are many more hours of tapes than the January 6 committee told us. It’s not 14,000, it’s 42,000 hours."

For security purposes, McCarthy continued, certain exits in the building may not be shown, but added, "the most interesting this, when I sat down, when I had the team talk to the Capitol police about making sure they had no problems with the exits showing, they said January 6 never asked them that," referring to the January 6 select committee.

"They showed the exit of the vice president, they showed the exit from my office. They literally had then-Speaker Pelosi’s daughter showing the secure location that they take the leadership. That’s not supposed to be known to anybody. And CNN reported it."

"I don't remember the press ever getting upset with that. So what we want to do is make sure we have this out that everybody can see it," he said.

In regards to a wide public release, McCarthy said, "We just want to make sure we go through them all and it takes time."

"And you know with Tucker, he saw just a few. It didn’t like — we released all the tapes to him. And the first thing that Tucker said too, he didn’t want to show any exits to cause any problems. We asked the Capitol Police, were there any concerns. They came back with one and we immediately mitigated that."

"But it was interesting that one that they had a problem with, Eric Swalwell had had up on the internet for the last two years showing that part," McCarthy concluded.