Sen. Lee Blasts Cheney For Recycling Jan. 6 Footage
New security footage and other video recorded during the Jan. 6, 2021, protest on Capitol Hill surfaced this week as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) made the first batch of more than 40,000 hours of evidence public.
“Truth and transparency are critical,” he said. “This decision will provide millions of Americans, criminal defendants, public interest organizations and the media an ability to see for themselves what happened that day, rather than having to rely upon the interpretation of a small group of government officials.”
A common response to the evidence was to denounce the conclusion of a partisan congressional probe that the protest amounted to a violent insurrection.
Several prominent Republicans, including U.S.Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, reacted by calling for an investigation of the house Jan. 6 committee.
Former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of the two Republicans on the Democratic-led panel, responded to the backlash against the committee by sharing some footage that has already been widely used to support the narrative that protesters were intent on causing violence and chaos at the Capitol building.
Lee and others were not interested in allowing Cheney to get the last word, though. He responded with a social media post asserting that “we’ve seen footage like that a million times” but the heretofore unseen video released by Johnson painted a much different picture.
“You made sure we saw that — and nothing else,” Lee wrote of the clip Cheney shared. “It’s the other stuff — what you deliberately hid from us — that we find so upsetting. Nice try.”
The Utah Republican went on to reference a common theory that there were federal agents in the crowd that day with the goal of inciting altercations.
“P.S. How many of these guys are feds? (As if you’d ever tell us),” Lee wrote.
Johnson’s decision to release a trove of Jan. 6 footage earned praise from a wide swath of his own party — including former President Donald Trump, who is facing criminal charges related to his own actions leading up to the protest.
“Congratulations to Speaker of the house, Mike Johnson for having the Courage and Fortitude to release all of the J6 Tapes, which will explicitly reveal what really happened on January 6th!” he wrote on social media on Friday.”
