Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and GOP leadership have a new plan to try to bring down Democrats: release the raw footage from the January 6 insurrection to even more people, including right-wing reporter John Solomon, pro-Trump writer Julie Kelly, and an unidentified "third source," in the hope the footage will exonerate the Capitol rioters.
This strategy is ill-fated, wrote Ja'han Jones for MSNBC's TheReidout Blog, calling Greene a "political dunce" who hasn't thought through any of this.
"You may remember [House Speaker Kevin] McCarthy previously released Jan. 6 footage to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who tried to downplay the threat posed by rioters by cherry-picking parts that don’t show violence. Here, we seem to have a similar scenario," wrote Jones. "The initial release was largely seen as a dud. And Carlson, whose team had hyped the footage as exculpatory for conservatives, seemingly acknowledged this by allowing the story to fall by the wayside. Nonetheless, it looks like Greene is pining for another go?"
Indeed, all that really came about from Carlson's release of out-of-context January 6 footage was that several Capitol rioters cited the footage in their trials, believing it to be exculpatory, when not only was it no such thing, the footage was already available to them in discovery.
The problem with these releases of footage, said Jones, is that "The assumption that the broad American public is interested in reliving Jan. 6 — one of the most traumatic and damaging political attacks in U.S. history — is the type of logic you’d expect from an alien who has never spent a moment interacting with actual humans in the United States. Or, perhaps, it’s just the twisted logic of Marjorie Taylor Greene."
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In other words, the plan could actually backfire and benefit Democrats, possibly by reminding voters that rioters tried to violently overthrow the 2020 election on behalf of Greene's party.
"When a right-wing Twitter account claimed Republicans were reneging on their promise to release the footage to the public, Greene offered a deranged excuse. People could use facial recognition software to identify people who were on the Capitol grounds that day and then 'ruin their lives,' she claimed," wrote Jones. "With Republicans like these, Democrats hardly need political advisers. Just paint Marjorie Taylor Greene as the brain of the operation and watch America shriek in terror."
