When I read this week that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — just seven weeks into his new role as Washington’s most powerful Republican — had leaked a massive treasure trove of Capitol Police security videos of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, my mind immediately went toward somebody else: Reality Winner.
Winner, you may recall, was the young Army veteran and security consultant who in 2017 decided to become a whistleblower when she learned in the course of her job that the federal government knew a lot more about Russian hacking into U.S. election systems than it was telling the public. The then-25-year-old’s leak of one document had the desired impact, as some election officials even acknowledged this news led to greater vigilance and beefed-up security.
But there were no medals or parades for Reality Winner’s act of heroism. On the contrary, federal agents and prosecutors from the administration of Donald Trump — Moscow’s preferred candidate, but probably just a coincidence, right? — came down hard. After she was cornered into a guilty plea, a judge meted out a staggering 63-month prison sentence, the longest for the leak of a government document in American history. Winner was ultimately confined for 44 months, including a difficult stint in a Texas federal lockup where she contracted COVID-19.
Let’s be perfectly clear about what Kevin McCarthy is doing here: He is hijacking the mantle of the whistleblowing truth-teller in carrying out his own leak — not one page, like Winner, but a whopping 44,000 hours of raw government video — that is actually a stunning abuse of his immense power as House speaker.
Kevin McCarthy is not a whistleblower. He is not exposing governmental malfeasance, but extending and advancing a criminal cover-up of what really happened on Jan. 6, the date of an attempted coup against the U.S. government. He is (probably) risking nothing in leaking the footage, but rather hoping to gain even more power by currying favor with extremists at Fox News and within the Republican Party. He is displaying not courage, but cowardice.
“I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public,” the California Republican told the New York Times this week when their reporters called seeking an explanation of the unprecedented release of the security video to a favored journalist. “I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment.”
That’s utter baloney. Of course, it’s hard for most everyday people to understand what McCarthy and his partners in crime at Fox News are up to, because you have to be able to hear the dog-whistle frequencies and understand the pretzel logic of Republicans and the cable-TV network that is their version of GOP state media.
In the days and months following the 2021 insurrection — in which thousands stormed and successfully breached the U.S. Capitol in a violent effort to prevent any peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump to incoming President Joe Biden, leading to the deaths of five people and scores of injuries — the far right has mounted a relentless campaign to argue this wasn’t what it looked like.
Carlson, the most watched prime-time host on cable TV, has occasionally and recklessly made the case that Jan. 6 was some type of “false flag” operation in which outside provocateurs — maybe FBI informants, or members of “antifa” — goaded peace-loving Trump supporters into entering the Capitol. But it’s been hard for the Fox News host or other conspiracy theorists to produce any actual evidence of what so clearly is a lie.
Thus, the push — led by the most extreme members of the Republican Party like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has gained power by forging an alliance with McCarthy during his just-barely successful campaign for the speakership — to sift through the massive trove of videos that were taken and preserved on Jan. 6 by the Capitol Police, filmed on an elaborate web of cameras inside the heart of U.S. governmental power.
“For all of you that doubted we would release the tapes. Here you go!” Greene tweeted this week in triumph as news spread that McCarthy’s “public release” of the tapes was actually exclusive first dibs for the pseudo-journalist most likely to craft a GOP-friendly neighborhood. In an age of increasingly sophisticated disinformation, we can’t yet know which images Carlson will attempt to spin as “suspicious,” but only that many viewers will believe his forthcoming “discoveries,” no matter how preposterous.
» READ MORE: Exhuming McCarthy: How minority rule could implode U.S. democracy in 2023
Top Democrats, as you might expect, are screaming foul, but they are also narrowly focusing on the security aspects of the leak — yet again desperate to prove that they and not Republicans are the party of actual law-and-order. The loudest complainers like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer aren’t wrong when they argue that the leak is a betrayal of the security apparatus on Capitol Hill and could offer a blueprint for future insurrectionists. But I also think Democrats are missing the greater import of what is happening here.
With Jan 6. the focus of overlapping investigations, including a U.S. Justice Department probe under special counsel Jack Smith that seems to be tightening the screws around Trump’s inner circle, it’s important to step back and view the actions of McCarthy and his collaborators at Fox News in the bigger picture: as an effort to shield the major conspirators of that attempted coup from being charged for their crimes.
McCarthy’s boast about throwing “sunshine” with his selective leak of the tapes is rich coming from a man who has been a key player in this long-running cover-up. After initially grasping the immorality of Jan. 6 and even suggesting privately that Trump resign before the end of his term, McCarthy has a) lied about his actions on that day; b) flip-flopped and flown to Mar-a-Lago to grovel before Trump, after lifting his finger to the political winds; c) attempted, before he was typically outsmarted by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to thwart congressional investigations of Jan. 6; and d) flirted with contempt of his own Congress by defying a subpoena to explain himself. His mishandling of the Capitol Police tapes is a gross escalation.
Fox News has been a co-conspirator in this effort to obstruct justice. Last week’s shocking but also not-shocking revelations, under the pressure of a lawsuit, of text messages showing that Carlson and other top news anchors, producers, and executives know that allegations of 2020 election fraud that motivated the insurrectionists were bogus — before they aired them anyway — was a confirmation of what should have been clear long ago.
The network founded by the late conservative impresario Roger Ailes cannot be considered a news organization, in the sense of broadcasting facts and producing “sunshine,” but as more of a racketeering outfit. It launders GOP lies and creates a delusional mass public — partly because of a shared ideology but mainly for TV ratings and the vast wealth that has made Carlson and his colleagues multi-millionaires. It’s a deft plate-spinning act that will now be perpetuated by Fox News’ selective editing of the Capitol Hill tapes.
This massive abuse of power and access isn’t happening in a vacuum. In fact, it very much mirrors what another of the most powerful people in America — the billionaire Elon Musk — has done to abuse the insider access he acquired through his $44 billion purchase of Twitter. Strikingly similar to what McCarthy is doing, Musk leaked a massive cache of raw internal “Twitter Files” to the friendliest big-name quasi-journalists he could find (like Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss) to create the bogus narrative he wanted, about alleged censorship by “woke” liberal Big Tech. It’s all a dangerous escalation of 21st century disinformation tactics.
But this new scheme also carries historical echoes of another powerful California Republican who worked for two years to impede American justice. Richard Nixon failed in Watergate, and the water-carriers for Donald Trump’s attempted overthrow of the government will fail as well, if the majority of Americans can ignore these deceptions and focus on the actual felonies that were committed in plain sight. If there is finally to be true justice in America, Reality Winner would be pardoned and Kevin McCarthy would be the one needing a lawyer.
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