House Republicans ignored repeated requests from the Capitol Police to review and approve any Jan. 6 security footage that would be made public, according to Capitol Police general counsel Thomas DiBiase.
Only one of the more than 40 clips that Fox News’ Tucker Carlson aired earlier this month — after getting exclusive access to over 40,000 hours of Jan. 6 security footage from Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — got vetted and approved beforehand, DiBiase said in a sworn affidavit filed on Friday.
The rest of the footage that Carlson aired was “never shown to me nor anyone else from the Capitol Police,” DiBiase said.
DiBiase’s statement was filed as part of a criminal case against Jan. 6 defendant William Pope. Pope is yet another alleged rioter who has requested the public release of the Jan. 6 security footage citing the exclusive access Carlson received. In reality, Jan. 6 defendants have had access to all relevant footage to build their defense for nearly two years.
In a six-page declaration, DiBiase explained that in February House Republicans started asking for all the footage that the Jan. 6 select committee had access to over the past year.
Complying with the request, the Capitol Police quickly installed three terminals in a House office building to grant Republicans access to the footage, according to DiBiase. He added they also provided four hard drives to the House GOP that they received from the Jan. 6 committee after it completed its work.
“At no time was I nor anyone else from the Capitol Police informed that anyone other than personnel from [the House Administration Committee] would be reviewing the camera footage,” DiBiase said.
Shortly after, reports that McCarthy gave Carlson exclusive access to Jan. 6 security footage surfaced and DiBiase said he learned that “personnel from the Tucker Carlson Show were allowed to view whatever footage they wanted while supervised by staff from [the House Administration Committee] but that no footage had been physically turned over to the show.”
A week later, Tim Monahan — a top aide to McCarthy and staff director for the House Administration Committee — requested a list of Capitol Police cameras that were deemed “sensitive,” like the ones that include details about evacuation routes and locations such as intelligence committee facilities.
DiBiase said that in “numerous conversations” over “several weeks” he “emphasized the Capitol Police’s desire to review every footage clip, whether it was on the Sensitive List or not, if it was going to be made public.” The Jan. 6 select committee had gone through that process with the department “in all cases,” DiBiase added — just like the federal prosecutors working on hundreds of cases related to alleged Jan. 6 rioters.
“Of the numerous clips shown during the Tucker Carlson show on March 6 and 7, 2023, I was shown only one clip before it aired, and that clip was from the Sensitive List,” he continued. “Since that clip was substantially similar to a clip used in the Impeachment Trial and was publicly available, I approved the use of the clip. The other approximately 40 clips, which were not from the Sensitive List, were never shown to me nor anyone else from the Capitol Police.”
