Speaker Mike Johnson Releases January 6 Capitol Security Footage

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) released security footage from the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riots to the public on Friday.

Johnson took to X, formerly Twitter, and shared a link to a House website containing five pages of videos with roughly 20 videos per page.

Follow the link below to view the January 6th tapes for yourself.

To restore America’s trust and faith in their Government we must have transparency. This is another step towards keeping the promises I made when I was elected to be your Speaker.https://t.co/aujSDeljba

— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) November 17, 2023

“Today, I am keeping my promise to the American people and making all the January 6th tapes available to ALL Americans,” Johnson tweeted moments before releasing the CCTV tapes.

“To restore America’s trust and faith in their Government we must have transparency. This is another step towards keeping the promises I made when I was elected to be your Speaker,” he wrote in another post. 

It comes after Speaker Emeritus Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) provided then-Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson access to what Axios reported was 41,000 hours of footage in February. Carlson aired a never-before-seen video of Jacob Chansley, the infamous “QAnon Shaman,” from the trove on his former show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, in March.

Carlson stated in his commentary of the video that Capitol Police officers acted as “tour guides” to Chansley.

🚨BREAKING: Never before seen video of January 6 shows Jacob Chansley, the QAnon Shaman, being led through the Capitol by police the entire time that he was in the building. pic.twitter.com/rikoRMWezF

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 7, 2023

The clip “does not support the claim that January 6th was an insurrection. In fact, it demolished that claim,” Carlson said. Carlson also referred to many of the protesters as “sightseers” rather than “insurrectionists.” 

Days later, McCarthy sat down with Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle and said the GOP-led House intended to release the full cache of footage to the public. 

“We just want to make sure we go through them all, and it takes time,” he continued.

Exclusive: Speaker McCarthy Vows Full Public Release of January 6 Surveillance Tapes

Matthew Perdie / Breitbart News, Jack Knudsen / Breitbart News , Zenny Phuong / Breitbart News

“The first thing that Tucker said too, he didn’t want to show any exits to cause any problems. We asked the Capitol Police, ‘Were there any concerns?’ They came back with one, and we mitigated that, but it was interesting, that one that they had a problem with, Eric Swalwell had had up on the internet for the last two years showing that part,” McCarthy said.