November 20 – In a little more than a month’s time, it will have been two years since the moments on January 6 when riots broke out in the United States Capitol in Washington, DC.
Since then there have been investigations and Congressional hearings and arrests made and a whole lot of money spent, but there hasn’t been all that much conclusion.
There is also video footage out there, but only a select few have been able to view it.
Why isn’t the public more interested in seeing the footage?
Pat Ryan of NewsTalk 103.7FM asked, “What is going on and where is the outrage at you being sold a bill of goods here? Will we ever get any kind of accountability? Four million dollars on that one.”
Attorney Clint Barkdoll said, “I don’t understand where the criticism is here about these videos. I’d like to hear more from Congress. My question is this: Why don’t you just release all the videos? I’ve never understood why with McCarthy, he gives select materials to Tucker Carlson but no one else was allowed to see it. Now you have Mike Johnson, he gives out some of the video.”
There are more than 40,000 hours of video tapes from that day.
Barkdoll suggested, “I think this might be part of the reason you’re not seeing much media coverage of this because they’ve been lobbying for a year now. I think there’s even some court petition saying just release it. I’ve never understood that either. Why doesn’t he just set up a website? Here’s all of the unedited video, have at it. If you’re a media outlet, a private citizen or whatever, just go look at it, but there must be some reason that they won’t do that. They’ll let out it sounds like a couple hundred hours which is a massive amount of tape but it’s over 40,000 hours that he’s sitting on that he’s refusing to release. He’s saying that eventually that’s the intention, but there seems to be questions well, why aren’t they doing it? It’s there, ready to go. Why not just upload it to a website right now?”
Michele Jansen of NewsTalk 103.7FM said, “I can speculate as to why they don’t want it released and why you hear members of that January 6 committee talking about security, it endangers the security. Because they selectively cherry picked a narrative that they could tell that makes the country believe it was an insurrection, that it was more planned than it really was, it seems like, and for some who’ve really gotten as much video as they can together and use AI to analyze the movements of certain Capitol Police that day, the claims are now and I know this is getting to the lawyers of some of the people who have been prosecuted or some of the people who are waiting to go on trial, that these Capitol Police did not tell the truth about where they were and what they saw because it was physically impossible for them to be at the place in time that they said they were. That would be incredibly damaging to the whole narrative but as I’ve stated a million times, truth delayed is truth denied because maybe you’ll finally get all the 44,000 videos, maybe someone will finally be able to go through it like some of these people have already tried to analyze and find even more overwhelming proof that we were lied to about how dangerous it was, how threatening it was or how coordinated it was. Well, people won’t believe it because it’s been too long since the original story and the original story seems to stick. I talked to someone not long ago who still believes a Capitol Hill policeman was killed when he was hit with a fire extinguisher that day and you cannot get those things out of people’s heads, even though that was a complete lie.”
Barkdoll agreed, “That is exactly part of the problem. Once the story and the narrative gets baked into the public psyche, it’s very difficult to change that. I think that’s why again, you’re not seeing a lot of media coverage of this because everyone is so skeptical. Why is it that you’re only releasing these portions of the tape until we can see the full 44,000 hours? It’s impossible to imagine what time it would take. I mean, you would need a team of dozens if not hundreds of workers slicing and dicing that volume of tape. It would take months if not years to go through all of that tape. I do think it’ll happen. I do think there’s a media outlet or an organization that will eventually devote the resources to make that happen, but I just have never understood whether it was McCarthy, J6 Committee itself, now Johnson, why there’s such hesitation to just put it out there for the public to see.”
Ryan pointed out, “You know what you don’t hear? You don’t hear any denial from Liz or Adam. At all. You hear nothing from these two that couldn’t wait to crow their brains out about the January 6 and the insurrection or all the rest of these things. They couldn’t wait to be in front of the TV cameras. Well, now we get to see exactly what you guys didn’t show or didn’t share. And where are you? Where’s Adam, I wonder?”
Jansen suggested, “AI might actually cut down on that time. If they can get AI to put things together quicker than human beings could do it. I mean, depending upon who would put the resources behind it, maybe we could find out sooner what actually happened that day. But like I said, there’s already reports that people putting together what they could have of what’s already out there, say there’s already proof that Capitol Hill Police testified falsely in some of these trials. So I wonder what’s going to happen. Can they pull those people back out then and say hey, this was a mistrial. This was done incorrectly.”
Ryan sighed, “Can you just imagine all those resources? What you should do is just drain the accounts of the people that were involved with this in the first place, that were doing this cover here.”
Barkdoll wondered, “Will the House initiate new proceedings? I mean, if that is the evidence that there’s videotape that wasn’t released that shows officers or others were lying, certainly the House would have the authority to re-empanel an oversight or an investigative committee and maybe that’s eventually where this will go. Again, Speaker Johnson would have the authority to do that.”
Jansen noted, “He used the word immediately. So how do you use the word immediately and then delay this?”
Barkdoll said, “I think that’s why some of the media is getting some heartburn over this. It sounds like there could be some redactions because there’s cameras in that building that might show secure facilities. I understand that. There may be legitimate reasons that some of it needs to be redacted or extracted. But again, it just seems like it’s been an awfully long time and the narrative has already developed and no one’s been able to see the full unedited batch of these tapes.”
