Lee said of the former GOP Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger on social media, “Maybe they never even questioned their own narrative.”
Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, is demanding an inquiry into the House January 6 committee, which was dissolved earlier this year. He charges that members of the committee, both past and present, “deliberately” withheld parts of the video that showed the Capitol rioting.
Lee made these remarks in response to House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who started sharing over 40,000 hours of video shot on January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol when demonstrators upset with the results of the 2020 election stormed into the hallways of Congress.
In a series of posts to X, the original name for Twitter, Lee emphasized the release of the footage and questioned the morality of former Republican representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.
Why never mentioned any of these videos did Liz Cheney and Adam Kizinger make? Perhaps they never searched for them. Perhaps they never even asked to have their own story questioned. In a post to the platform, Lee shared a video purporting to show Capitol police personnel assisting demonstrators in passing through the building that day. “Maybe they were just too busy selectively leaking the text messages of Republicans they wanted to defeat,” Lee wrote.
“People who helped hide the J6 tapes” and “are cut out of the same cloth as those who will tell you that FISA 702 must be reauthorized without reforms—’because search warrants require too much effort,'” according to a different post by Lee to X.
He added, “We need to look into the J6 committee,” to another post.
In addition, Lee attacked the select committee as a whole and the then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, who had constituted it to look into what happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“Given the evidence they apparently suppressed, how much footage (and how many other records) do you think Nancy Pelosi and the J6 committee deliberately lost or destroyed?” Lee asked in a single post.
Lee responded to a tweet made by Cheney on Friday, stating, “Liz, we’ve seen footage like that a million times,” along with “some January 6th video” showing angry demonstrators fighting with Capitol police. You saw to it that we saw it and nothing more. The other stuff, the things you purposefully kept from us, is what bothers us the most. Nice attempt.
“PS: What percentage of these folks work for the federal government? (As if you’d ever tell us),” Lee continued in his reply to the outgoing congressman.
Lee stated in another article, “Taxpayer dollars funded the sham J6 committee.”
The Republican senator also emphasized a video released on Friday showing an officer working inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021, who was uncuffed and freed a demonstrator. In the video, the protester can be seen throwing a fist bump to what appears to be another cop who was close at the moment of his release.
“I walk through these doors several times a day.” “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Lee responded.
Speaker Johnson said in a statement that the remaining Capitol Hill security footage would be released on January 6, 2021: “When I ran for Speaker, I promised to make available to the American people the 44,000 hours of video from Capitol Hill security taken on January 6, 2021.” The importance of truth and honesty cannot be overstated.”
Some video was made accessible to the public on Friday, with the most of it being shared progressively over time, according to Johnson.
Johnson stated that the decision to release the remainder of the footage “will provide millions of Americans, criminal defendants, public interest organizations, and the media an ability to see for themselves what happened that day, rather than having to rely upon the interpretation of a small group of government officials.”
Johnson stated that approximately 5% of the footage will be withheld due to “sensitive security information related to the building architecture,” and that certain faces would be obscured “to avoid any persons from being targeted for retaliation of any kind.”
It is being made public by the House Administration Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee.