Sometimes stories break that are so sad you don’t know what to do with them. Wednesday, Politico announced that the defendants in the January 6 show trials would finally be allowed to, now hold onto your seat, see all of the video of the event in which they are accused of participating.
House Republicans are moving to provide defendants in Jan. 6-related cases access to thousands of hours of internal Capitol security footage, a move that could influence many of the ongoing prosecutions stemming from 2021’s violent attack.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), who chairs the House Administration Committee’s oversight subpanel, said that the access for accused rioters and others — which Speaker Kevin McCarthy has greenlighted — would be granted on a “case-by-case basis.”
“Everyone accused of a crime in this country deserves due process, which includes access to evidence which may be used to prove their guilt or innocence,” Loudermilk told POLITICO in a statement. “It is our intention to make available any relevant documents or videos, on a case-by-case basis, as requested by attorneys representing defendants.”
Loudermilk, you’ll recall, is the Georgia representative slandered by members of the J6 committee openly and in leaks to the media as well as in the final committee report. He was accused of leading J6 rioters on a reconnaissance of the US Capitol when the actual truth was that one guy on a tour he conducted of two House office buildings that were not involved in the J6 demonstration had attended the Trump rally but was not involved in the demonstration. See my post; The J6 Committee Lied to America About Representative Loudermilk, When Will Speaker McCarthy Punish the Liars?
There are people awaiting trial, some on relatively minor offenses, who have been incarcerated since 2021. They have only had access to that video the prosecution wants to give them. A more significant problem is that Nancy Pelosi, in her role as the most corrupt Speaker in the history of the Republic, used the “separation of powers” doctrine to restrict the video available to the Department of Justice. Former RedStater shipwreckedcrew, who is now the attorney of record for Jake Chansley, aka the “QAnon Shaman,” says:
That might be part of the explanation for why the number “14,000 hours” has been used so frequently for two years but now McCarthy and Fox say the video released by the House totals 41,000 hours.
More to come as this continues to unfold.
— Shipwreckedcrew.substack.com (@shipwreckedcrew) March 7, 2023
Basically, 30,000 hours of video that may be relevant to the defense of political prisoners has been withheld from them and their attorneys. It may not be relevant, but the government and certainly not the corrupt Speaker of the House doesn’t get to decide that.
So, even if, by some mischance, the Department of Justice was acting in good faith, the majority of the video from January 6 was not available to them. Moreover, the January 6 committee members themselves were never allowed access to all of the video; see Bennie Thompson Stuns and Confuses, Claims January 6th Committee Members Never Had Access to Footage.
Just as the J6 committee was a lineal successor of Josef Stalin’s show trials, what is going on in federal court in DC is not much better. There is no reason why any of the video from January 6 should have ever been kept secret from members of Congress or the public, but keeping it from the J6 detainees and their counsel flies in the face of any semblance of a fair trial.
I’ve long had my issues with Speaker McCarthy — and I still have a lot of them — but this act of charity, good faith, and fair dealing with the J6 detainees and the nation gives me hope that he will be better than the foul oligarch he replaced.
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