Johnson’s release of video on January 6 reflects right-wing conspiracy theories

Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to publicly release thousands of hours of Capitol security footage from Jan. 6, 2021, has fueled a renewed effort by Republican lawmakers and far-right activists to rewrite the history of the attack that day and ban pro-Trump rioters to exonerate. who participated.

Mr Johnson’s move last week to make the images available — something the far right has long called for — came as he tried to calm the anger of hardline Republican lawmakers for working with Democrats to keep the government funded. Now, some of the same people who were outraged by that decision are using the January 6 video to spread a series of false claims and conspiracy theories about the largest attack on the Capitol in centuries.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia Republican, was one of the first lawmakers to post false information about the recently released videos. She claimed on the social media site

But the item in the man’s hand in the screen recording on closer inspection it appears to have been a vape pen. And the man seen in that image, Kevin Lyons, was in fact a heating and cooling technician – not a police officer – who was later convicted at a public trial of multiple federal charges and convicted to more than four years in prison.

Mrs. Greene later edited her message to dispel the false claim, but not before it had spread widely among Trump supporters.

Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, circulated the same clip and the false accusation that the man in the photo had flashed a badge, adding that he looked forward to speaking to FBI Director Christopher S. Wray about the matter. interrogate.

“How many of these guys are FBI?” he asked in a separate post that included that video of a violent clash between rioters and police.

“Take note,” former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who was the top Republican on the House special committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, responded to Mr. Lee. “It looks like a crazy conspiracy theorist is posting from your account.”

Still others, such as Donald Trump Jr., have shared a video of rioters walking through the halls of the Capitol and not doing anything violent, suggesting that those who entered the building were completely peaceful. But other videos from that day show the same people storming the building and attacking police officers at other times.

“This is consistent with what they are doing,” said Soumya Dayananda, who served as a senior investigator for the House committee on Jan. 6. “It’s just picking and choosing from what they think their conspiracy theory will advance.”

For Mr. Johnson, releasing about 40,000 hours of video footage fulfilled a promise he made to far-right lawmakers as a way to try to win their support for the speakership. He said more than 95 percent of the footage – all except parts considered a security risk – will be posted online in tranches over the coming months.

He strongly suggested that the videos contradict the public’s understanding of what happened on January 6, 2021, when hundreds of President Donald J. Trump’s supporters violently attacked the Capitol, inspired by his lie about a stolen election, causing the certification of Congress was disrupted by Congress. 2020 election results.

“When bureaucrats and partisan activists withhold data to advance a narrative, it undermines trust in our institutions,” Mr Johnson said. posted on social media. “We have to restore that trust.”

On Monday, Mr Johnson sent out an email to raise money to benefit from the move.

“When I ran for this office, I promised to release the January 6 footage so that Americans could see for themselves what happened that day, rather than the opinions of the partisan January 6 Committee,” he wrote. “And I keep that promise.”

News outlets including The New York Times had also pushed for the release of the videos, which lawyers for the January 6 suspects had long had access to. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, had allowed the footage to be viewed in person in a House office building but declined to post it all online due to Capitol Police security concerns. They have warned that opening the video for widespread public consumption could give future attackers a road map of the Capitol.

The videos show huge crowds gathering at the Capitol, mobs committing violent acts and attacking police. They also show other moments when protesters behaved peacefully as they forced their way into the building, which is closed to the public.

Selective clips that focus on seemingly peaceful moments, and posts that use them to cast doubt on what happened that day, have racked up hundreds of thousands of views on mainstream and alternative social media platforms in recent days.

In a 48 second clip that is widely shared online – including by Mr Lee – a detained man appears to fist bump a police officer after his hands are released from handcuffs and he is released at a door. The vast majority of posters cite this as evidence that January 6 was an “inside job.” It is unclear what exactly happened at that moment, but officers released many defendants that day because they did not have the manpower to detain and assault the participants. The clip was taken from a nearly ten-minute file that also shows officers struggling with protesters.

The man in question was later arrested And accused of assaulting police officers.

“The amplification of these narratives by leading figures, including government officials, lends a sense of validity to these stories,” said Katherine Keneally, chief of threat assessment and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which investigated January 6-related disinformation. She added: “With this increase in perceived validity, we also have the potential for an increase in threats, especially to government officials.”

Some social media users have used the false claims surrounding the released images to call for the jailing of specific members of the January 6 committee, accusing them of treason.

The Justice Department has charged more than 1,200 people in connection with the attack on the Capitol. The indictment shows a range of accusations. Some, including the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, have been convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to long prison terms; others have been charged with mere trespassing and received no jail time.

“Of course there are people who just followed the crowd and entered the Capitol,” Ms. Dayananda said. “But that doesn’t absolve the people who stormed Nancy Pelosi’s office, destroyed her property and beat up the police.”

The videos also show a range of approaches by police officers in different situations. Some fought a bloody battle to prevent rioters from entering the building; some tried to convince people to leave the halls of Congress; others, who are heavily outnumbered, merely keep an eye on the crowd.

Six Capitol Police officers, out of a force of 2,000, were disciplined for their actions during the Jan. 6 riot, including conduct unbecoming and failing to follow guidelines. But many more people fought mightily to keep the rioters out. About 150 police officers were injured in the attack.

The fact that some FBI informants were in the crowd of tens of thousands of people has long been known, and does not indicate that the federal government was behind the attack.

Steven M. D’Antuono, the former leader of the FBI’s Washington field office, testified before the House Judiciary Committee in June that he believed there may have been a “handful” of people in the crowd that day who had previously served as informants for field offices. But, he said, they were not asked by the agency to attend.

The Washington field office “may have had” an informant about drugs or violent crimes in the crowd “who didn’t tell us they were going,” Mr. D’Antuono said as an example. “People have a citizen’s right to protest.”

One of the FBI informants in the crowd on January 6 was James Ehren Knowles, a member of the Proud Boys Kansas City chapter. Right-wing politicians and pundits have tried to spin Mr. Knowles’ presence in the Capitol into a narrative suggesting that the bureau used secret agents to incite the riot, but he told a very different story under oath during the seditious conspiracy trial of the Proud Boys.

Mr. Knowles testified that he was not acting “at the direction of the FBI” that day, but had joined the crowd as a member of the far-right group — or what one prosecutor described as “an independent human being” who made his own decisions. .

“You weren’t there in a formal sense as an agent of the US government, were you?” the prosecutor asked Mr. Knowles.

“No,” he replied.

Most of the federal informants who have emerged from criminal cases related to January 6 were not instructed by their handlers to spy on right-wing subjects — let alone to try to entrap Trump supporters to storm the Capitol storm. They were mostly far-right figures recruited by the FBI to report on their opponents in the far-left antifa movement.

Efforts to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were central to former Trump’s campaign to reclaim the White House. He has used footage of the Capitol riot at his rallies, showing that the mob violence was patriotic, and has recorded a song with jailed January 6 rioters.

“Congratulations to Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson for his courage and determination to release all the J6 tapes, which will fully reveal what really happened on January 6,” Trump said in a video release on Tuesday.

Many Republicans have spent years trying to rewrite the history of what happened on January 6, downplaying or outright denying the violence.

One of them, Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana, last week promoted a conspiracy theory that the federal government had used “ghost buses” to transport undercover agents to the Capitol to carry out the attack.

“These buses are disgraceful in nature and were full of FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters, who were deployed to our Capitol on January 6,” Mr Higgins told Mr Wray at a hearing.

Mr Wray replied that he had never heard of ‘ghost buses’.

“If you ask whether the violence at the Capitol on January 6 was part of an operation orchestrated by FBI sources and/or agents,” Mr. Wray said, “the answer is an emphatic no.”