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Following the Friday night release of thousands of hours of Jan. 6 tapes, Speaker Mike Johnson gave insight on why he felt the move was necessary.
“The American people can always be trusted to evaluate information and make their own judgments and decisions,” Johnson wrote on X Saturday morning.
Slamming “bureaucrats and partisan activists,” Johnson said their choice to keep Americans in the dark to “advance a narrative” results in an erosion of trust in U.S. institutions.
“We must restore that trust,” Johnson concluded.
In another post, Johnson said the release of this footage is the fulfillment of a promise he made in the tumultuous race for House Speaker, stating that “truth and transparency are critical.”
The Jan. 6 tapes may be accessed on the Committee on House Administration’s website. However, the congressman noted that the video processing “will involve blurring the faces of private citizens on the yet unreleased tapes to avoid any persons from being targeted for retaliation of any kind and segregating an estimated 5% of the videos that may involve sensitive security information related to the building architecture.”
Johnson hopes that the release of these tapes will give the American people, criminal defendants, public interest organizations, and the media a chance to see what actually happened on Jan. 6, 2021, “rather than having to rely upon the interpretation of a small group of government officials.”