The Justice Department argued on Tuesday that Jan. 6 defendants shouldn’t be allowed to delay their upcoming criminal trials based on speculation that the 40,000-plus hours of security footage House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) recently made available exclusively to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson might contain exculpatory evidence.
“The United States does not know the extent of any material that a member of the legislative branch purportedly provided to other individuals,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean McCauley wrote in a court filing for the Jan. 6 defendant Ryan Nichols’ case. “This Court should not commit to an indefinite trial extension for this Defendant, or for any defendants, based on the unsupported allegation that pertinent information may exist somewhere, but is not currently known to either the prosecution or the defense.”
The filing is one of the Justice Department’s first attempts to minimize the possibility of Jan. 6 defendants using the footage Tucker Carlson airs to drag out their criminal cases.
The court filing came shortly after Nichols’ attorney asked the U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth to delay the late March trial in order to give Nichols’ defense team time to review the footage. The Justice Department submitted a similar filing in Jan. 6 defendant Shane Jenkins’ case in response to a request from Jenkins to delay the trial in order to review footage.
DOJ lawyers pushed back, arguing that the defense team had access to a “voluminous discovery” — more than 4.91 million files — for nearly two years.
“The Government’s discovery obligations in a criminal case are properly limited to materials that are potentially relevant to a defendant’s case in the government’s possession or control, and the government is not obliged to acquire materials possessed or controlled by others,” McCauley wrote, adding the trial shouldn’t be delayed “based on speculation about whether and when any such additional, likely irrelevant, information may become available.”
Prosecutors also backed up ongoing warnings from Democrats about the security risks of sharing the footage, arguing that widely releasing all security footage could “reveal the U.S. Capitol’s internal surveillance system to third parties” and “jeopardize the privacy and security of certain persons depicted on such CCV footage.”
McCarthy is using the surveillance footage to appease his right wing by facilitating an alternative, revisionist history of Jan. 6. The exclusive access McCarthy provided to Carlson has already led to a Fox News segment in which Carlson dismissed the deadly Capitol riot as a “mostly peaceful chaos” filled with “sightseers” touring the Capitol building. Similarly, House Republicans announced that they would provide accused Jan. 6 rioters with the security footage on a “case-by-case basis,” the implication being that exculpatory evidence was being withheld from defendants that many House Republicans have elevated to the status of “political prisoners.”
Read the court document here:
