Greene says McCarthy will release Jan. 6 tapes to three more outlets

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) announced Wednesday that three additional media outlets will receive access to footage from the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol.  

“Huge news: As I promised the J6 tapes will be released,” Greene tweeted.

Greene said in her post that three outlets will receive “unfettered access to the J6 tapes,” noting that reporting on it will start Thursday. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), according to Greene, will give the tapes to Just the News founder John Solomon and Julie Kelly, a senior writer at American Greatness — but she did not mention what the third outlet would be.

Discussions over whether the Jan. 6 tapes should be released to media outlets ramped up earlier this year after McCarthy granted former Fox News host Tucker Carlson access to more than 44,000 hours of footage from the attacks on the Capitol. The move prompted criticism from Democrats and media pundits who warned that the footage could threaten security procedures at the Capitol.  

When airing the footage on his program, Carlson described the attacks as “mostly peaceful chaos.”  

That prompted Greene to reiterate her calls to publicly release all the Jan. 6 footage, saying earlier this month that she was “wondering” when the tapes would be released.

“We need to release the J6 tapes to a public on line source so that everyone knows what did and didn’t happen, we need to restore fair justice, and America can move on,” she tweeted at the time. 

News organizations filed a lawsuit last month to gain access to the tapes, alleging that federal agencies have not given them the requested footage. The news organizations also wrote that they had asked McCarthy to grant them access to the footage.  

“Plaintiffs have continued to press the Speaker’s Office for access to the videos as quickly as possible and on equal terms with other media requestors, only to be told that the Speaker’s Office will not even provide a timeline for when such access might begin,” the complaint states. 

The outlets included in the lawsuit are Advance Publications, The Associated Press, CNN, CBS, The E.W. Scripps Company, Gannett, The New York Times, Politico and ProPublica. 

The Hill has reached out to McCarthy’s office for comment.