As we previously reported, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) released all the 44,000 hours of Jan. 6 footage. Immediately, the release blew apart the Jan. 6 Committee's narrative about the event.
The video release showed why they were likely suppressed. They included police escorting peaceful protesters walking through the Capitol, even shaking their hands. There was even a video showing one "protester" who appeared to have been cuffed, then taken to an area by the Capitol Police, where he was released and fist-bumped one of the officers.
That raised many questions about whether the man released was an undercover officer, which then again raises the question about the involvement of law enforcement in the action.
But that didn't make people like former Rep. Liz Cheney happy that people were seeing things that her Committee didn't reveal. The Committee's main focus seemed to be to attack former President Donald Trump and the Republicans before the 2022 election and emphasize the violence. It's one of the reasons that Cheney lost her Wyoming race by almost 40 percentage points because folks in Wyoming wanted someone who was going to serve them and not her obsession with Trump. But video that showed people being escorted by the police or shaking hands with the police tended to blow up the narrative Cheney and the Committee were pushing.
Cheney didn't want this revealed. Cheney threw a tantrum about the release of the footage and tried to head off the damage from the revealed reality.
But Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) wasn't going to let her get away with that, and he spoke for a lot of us as he nuked her in response.
"Liz, we’ve seen footage like that a million times," Lee scolded her.
"You made sure we saw that—and nothing else. It’s the other stuff—what you deliberately hid from us—that we find so upsetting. Nice try. P.S. How many of these guys are feds? (As if you’d ever tell us)."
He then said they needed to investigate the Jan. 6 Committee.
Exactly. They had an obligation to reveal this and yet, they didn't. Cheney and her Committee cherry picked what served their narrative and left things that didn't help the narrative out of their presentation.
How many people were jailed for simply walking through the Capitol, who didn't hurt anyone and weren't in any way violent? And if those people had been involved in a leftist action -- doing the same thing -- we know the likelihood is that they wouldn't have faced the same consequences. How many undercover people were there, and what did they do? The Committee doesn't want us to know that -- a U.S. Senator hasn't even been told the truth on this.
The American people have a right to know the full truth. But that wasn't what they were getting from the Committee.
With the release of some 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from January 6th came hysterical responses from the usual suspects. Adam Kinzinger and Jamie Raskin were quick to weigh in, decrying the move toward transparency. Then there was Liz Cheney.
Cheney spent the waning years of her political career obsessing over January 6th until voters finally sent her home for good. In the aftermath of her Wyoming primary defeat, grand predictions that Cheney would become more powerful than ever graced airwaves and front pages. In the end, though, she quickly fell into obscurity having lost the one thing that made her relevant.
Like a crack fiend getting a lead on a new score, though, Cheney jumped back into the fray following the release of the January 6th footage.
Yes, Liz, we've seen that video dozens of times at this point. It was played during the January 6th hearings. It was played over and over on cable news networks. It's been posted thousands of times on social media sites. And yet, it is completely irrelevant to the broader revelations of the newly released footage.
Why? Because one act does not denote another act. Just because someone outside a building punched someone does not mean a different person inside the building punched someone. As is common with chaotic situations, there are often a large number of people present who have no intention to commit violent acts and ultimately do not do so despite being in the vicinity.
In essentially every other riotous situation that I can recall, that distinction has been made both rhetorically and practically. Who can forget the "fiery but mostly peaceful" riots during the Summer of 2020? In that case, thousands of people were not arrested or pursued despite being adjacent to violent acts and looting. Just a few days prior to this writing, pro-Hamas protesters tried to storm the Democratic National Committee. A single person was arrested.
Yet, when it comes to January 6th, we aren't allowed to say that there is a difference between those who fought police officers and those who wandered aimlessly taking selfies. What exactly is Liz Cheney so afraid of? Why is she so terrified of and triggered by the American public having a fuller picture of what occurred at the Capitol that day?
The answer is simple. Cheney and others see January 6th as a political bludgeon, and for it to be effective, their narrative must be airtight. There can be no nuance. There can't be any participants who just got caught up in the chaos. Instead, every single person who approached and entered the Capitol Building must be painted as an insidious insurrectionist with that express intent. Otherwise, the day becomes just a little bit less significant, and we can't have that, can we?