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Kevin McCarthy's J6 footage deal endangers our country the same way Edward Snowden did: expert
March 1, 2023 9:31PM ET
Kevin McCarthy (Photo by Stefani Reynolds for AFP)
/mccarthy-deal/Former CIA officer and FBI agent Tracy Walder tore into House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on MSNBC Wednesday for his decision to turn over more than 40,000 hours of raw Capitol footage from January 6 to Fox News.
In fact, she argued, McCarthy's actions parallel those of Edward Snowden, the computer contractor who famously fled to Russia after turning over sensitive National Security Administration information to the press.
"Tracy, as somebody who has been in law enforcement, this, to me, is the equivalent of giving a burglar the security camera footage," said anchor Joy Reid. "Saying, now you know how the whole house is laid out. If you want to go back in there, you have the blueprints. In this case, the burglars ransacked the Capitol and threatened to hang the Vice President of the United States and kill the Speaker. So, this seems to me to be an entire mess. Your thoughts."
"So really, I have two thoughts on that," said Walder. "First of all, as someone who served in Afghanistan, served my country and was in harm's way, I did not risk my life for something like this to happen, to really hand these back over to people to go ahead and potentially raid the Capitol again if whomever they want isn't seated as president."
"But also, the way I look at this, strangely, is actually no different than what Edward Snowden did," Walder continued. "If you think about it, he took these documents, these classified documents, laid out blueprints of our satellites, gave them to the media. In this case Tucker Carlson. Then the media selectively chose what was out there. Then it's a huge breach to our national security, all these countries know what we have in terms of our capabilities."
"The reality is, if this information is put out there and isn't handled carefully, we could, more so than just the Proud Boys, be giving this sensitive information to other countries," added Walder. "That's a huge national security problem."
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