Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has changed her position on the public release of the tapes documenting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, warning Friday that their release could “put the security of the Capitol at risk.”
Greene said in an interview on the right-wing channel Real America’s Voice that releasing the video footage publicly would jeopardize the Capitol’s security and endanger those who were present at the Capitol grounds but did not enter the Capitol nor commit crimes.
“And this is our real concern with the videotapes. If we released these videotapes just widely for the public — number one, we put the security of the Capitol at risk, because there’s over 1,700 video cameras,” she said.
“Number two, we also endanger many Americans that were simply standing on the Capitol grounds, maybe never even walked through the Capitol or committed any crimes, but they could have just walked further than where the barrier was simply because the barrier was torn down by the time they got there,” Greene continued.
She said she is concerned about “leftist groups” that would use facial-recognition technology to identify those seen in the videos to “hand them over” to the FBI and Justice Department. She said that some people committed violence and broke the law and should be held accountable but many others did not commit crimes.
Greene also later criticized in a tweet a group called Sedition Hunters, which is a “global community of open-source intelligence investigators” that work to help the FBI and Capitol Police identify people who allegedly committed crimes during the insurrection.
“Sedition Hunters would spend every second of every day analyzing the videos in order to hunt innocent people that just stood on Capitol grounds on J6,” Greene later tweeted.
The group’s website states that its members investigate publicly available photos and videos of rioters who are wanted by the FBI and Capitol Police for alleged crimes.
Greene has previously called for the public release of the tapes so “everyone knows what did or didn’t happen.”
She announced Wednesday that that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) planned to release the tapes to three outlets that would receive “unfettered access.” She said two of the recipients of the tapes would be Just the News founder John Solomon, who interviewed Greene on Friday, and American Greatness senior writer Julie Kelly.
McCarthy released 44,000 hours of footage to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson earlier this year, yielding criticism from Democrats who argued that it could put Capitol security procedures at risk and allow Carlson, who has downplayed the violence from the attack, to distort what happened.
Updated at 12:29 p.m. June 5