Newly released footage from the halls of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, indicates that lawmakers on the now-defunct Democrat-led Jan. 6 investigative committee selectively edited footage to show Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) fleeing the building while concealing the broader context that Hawley was among a larger group of lawmakers and congressional staff being ushered out of the building.
On Monday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson played a series of clips from the Capitol security footage that Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy recently shared with Tucker’s production team.
The footage showed a group of lawmakers jogging down a hallway, with Hawley in the back of the group.
Carlson presented the footage of the lawmakers running out of the Capitol alongside the shorter clip of the duplicate footage that the Jan. 6 committee had presented, which showed only Hawley running down the hallway on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Democrat-controlled Jan. 6 committee had presented
footage on July 22, 2022, showing only Hawley running down the hall. At the time, Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) also presented a photo of Hawley raising a fist in the air in an apparent display of solidarity with protesters who gathered outside the Capitol on Jan. 6. At the time of Hawley’s raised fist display, the protests had not been violent. Still, Luria shared claims that Hawley’s gesture “riled up the crowd.”
The clip the Jan. 6 committee played in July was met with laughter from those in attendance. In his immediate reaction following the initial presentation of the clip, Jan. 6 witness and former DC police officer Michael Fanone
told reporters outside the hearing room that he thought “Josh Hawley is a [expletive].”
“In fact, the surveillance footage we reviewed shows that famous clip was a sham, edited deceptively by the January 6 committee,” Carlson said. “The clip was propaganda, not evidence. The actual videotape shows that Hawley was one of many lawmakers being ushered out of the building by Capitol Hill Police Officers and, in fact, Hawley was at the back of the pack.”
Reactions to Footage Release
NTD News contacted Hawley’s office for comment, but he did not respond before the article was published. Hawley’s spokeswoman, Abigail Marone, did tweet that the Jan. 6 committee lied to the American people, with the help of
news producers the committee brought on to make their hearings more captivating.
“Reminder that the ‘producers’ who the clownshow Jan 6 committee hired knew what they were doing when they lied to the American people. They had all the footage and chose to take it out of context to go after their political opponents like Josh Hawley. And they bragged about it,” Marone tweeted on Monday night. “The American people should’ve had the full context all along. Instead, we got a Democrat political ad funded by our taxpayer dollars.”
NTD News also contacted the office of Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who had chaired the now-disbanded special investigative committee. Thompson did not respond before this article was published.
Thompson had previously criticized McCarthy for sharing the security footage with Carlson, saying the decision posed “significant security concerns” and describing Carlson as someone who “routinely spreads misinformation” and “propaganda.”
NTD News also reached out to Luria, but she has yet to respond by the time this article was published.
Luria was one of 23 Democratic lawmakers who
lost their seats in Congress during the 2022 midterm elections, leading to the Republican Party gaining control of the House of Representatives.
Defendants Seek More Footage
In addition to showing some broader context of Hawley’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, Carlson also aired footage that showed Capitol Police officers peacefully escorting convicted defendant Jacob Chansley—the so-called “
QAnon Shaman“—around the building. While Chansley is serving one of the longest sentences of anyone convicted for entering the Capitol on Jan. 6, he was not accused of any specific violent acts, and Carlson said the footage showed that Chansley ”understood that Capitol Police were his allies.”
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growing number of defendants have begun requesting trial delays to allow them time to review the security footage from the Capitol, which continues to be largely unavailable to the general public. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, has already denied one defendant’s request for time to review additional security footage, saying the defendant, Sara Carpenter, failed to show that the previously undisclosed footage would support her claims of innocence.
