A newly released video is calling into question the transparency of the House Select Committee tasked with investigating January 6.
In the clip shot by her own daughter, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is seen on camera blaming herself for the lack of National Guard troops at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The subcommittee apparently had this footage at the time of its dramatic hearings but chose not to release it.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by Jonathan Turley, author of The Indispensable Right, to discuss the recently uncovered video and what it says about the state of the First Amendment.
The Footage
Earlier this month, the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight released previously unseen video footage of Pelosi accepting “responsibility” for the lack of security at the Capitol on January 6 for Donald Trump’s Stop the Steal rally.
“We have responsibility, Terri,” Pelosi can be heard telling chief-of-staff Terri McCullough as they are in a vehicle leaving the chaotic scene. ”We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have. This is ridiculous.”
The California congresswoman also seemed to scoff at McCullough for asking, only after the situation had already devolved, if the National Guard should be called in for help. “You’re going to ask me in the middle of the thing, when they’ve already breached the inaugural stuff, ‘Should we call the Capitol Police– I mean, the National Guard?’ Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with,” Pelosi asked.
The Cover Up
The footage was captured by Pelosi’s own daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, for an HBO documentary she was filming at the time. Megyn called the clip “pretty extraordinary” and said it “raises some serious questions about the January 6 committee and its commitment to transparency and honesty.”
According to Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), the January 6 subcommittee’s chair and vice chair – Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) – had the video but did not release it publicly or archive it properly. As such, Loudermilk’s committee obtained it from HBO directly.
“As Nancy Pelosi was being evacuated from the Capitol on January 6, 2021 she admitted that, as Speaker of the House, she was responsible for the security failures, and for not having the National Guard at the Capitol,” Loudermilk said in a statement. “However, after the dust settled from the breach of the Capitol, she spent 20 million taxpayer dollars for her January 6 Select Committee to create a narrative that shifted the blame on President Trump. The Democrats’ partisan select committee went to great lengths to suppress and hide evidence that didn’t support their predetermined narrative about that day, including this video of Speaker Pelosi admitting that she was responsible for the security failures at the Capitol.”
Threats to Free Speech
Turley’s new book examines threats to the First Amendment and uses January 6 as a case study because, he noted, “it does capture the difficulty of dealing with free speech.”
As he explained, he does not condone what happened at the Capitol that day. “I was doing the coverage on January 6,” he recalled. “I disagreed with the president’s speech, I disagreed with his view of what [Vice President Mike] Pence could do legally, and I also disagreed with aspects of the election fraud allegations.”
That does not, however, have any bearing on Trump’s constitutional right to say what he said. “The president had every right to give the speech the way he did,” Turley admitted. “In my view, it’s entirely protected speech.”
That is why he opposes Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump in Washington, D.C. “I think that he is prosecuting the president, in part, for speech protected by the First Amendment,” he said.
And he was similarly critical of the investigation into January 6. “Pelosi, of course, did not allow the Republicans to pick the members on that committee – departing from tradition – and the result was that they presented this univocal, one-sided narrative,” Turley noted. “Whenever they quoted or played the tape of Trump, they would not allow the public to hear him say ‘go peacefully to the Capitol,’ they even got a producer from ABC to create this whole production, and we now know that they withheld evidence.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Turley by tuning in to episode 819 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.