The narrative will be pixelated.
Speaker Mike Johnson made clear that in releasing to the public video footage of the Jan. 6 riot on the Capitol attack he planned to do so with the intention of blurring peoples' faces.
"We have to blur some faces of 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," Johnson said on Tuesday.
And he attempted to underline the reasons for why the tapes need to be released, albeit in their altered form.
“I don’t think partisan elected officials in Washington should present a narrative and expect that it should be seen as the ultimate truth,” Johnson said of Jan. 6. “The release of the January 6 tapes is a critical and important exercise. We want transparency... House Republicans trust the American people to draw their own conclusions.”
But former prosecutor Barbara McQuaid cautioned that his statements came awfully close to reckless.
"This is an incredibly irresponsible thing for someone to say," she said during her appearance on MSNBC's "The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell" on Tuesday. "In some ways he is stating a plan to obstruct the investigation."
In fact, a great deal of footage has already been used by the FBI to further their investigations to garner tips into who was possibly breaking the law on that day.
"Many of the Jan. 6 defendants were identified by video that was shown on social media or elsewhere where somebody would say,' Hey I know that guy...That person's my neighbor!' And that lead was used to put together other evidence to find that the person was they're engaging in crimes on that day."
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Rather than effectively put forward the raw visual evidence to let the public draw their own conclusions, McQuade suspects the words and the moves by the Speaker are attempting to commandeer the narrative of what transpired that day which is rioters storming the Capitol Building in order to prevent the certification of the presidency won by then President-Elect Joe Biden.
"I think what's really going on here is that Mike Johnson is engaging in this disinformation campaign to revise history and to suggest that, as you say, these people were 'freedom fighters' and 'hostages' and were not what we all know them to be which is criminals."
"And it is really trying to re-frame the debate, re-frame what happened before our very eyes on Jan. 6 and it goes right into a lot of the things that Donald Trump said, blaming Antifa for the attack on Jan. 6."
