House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is poised to give special access to security footage of the January 6 insurrection to a far-right personality who accused a police officer injured during the attack of being a “crisis actor,” and who has depicted the insurrectionists as patriotic Americans who were victimized by police brutality.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a close ally of McCarthy, announced Wednesday on Twitter that the Republican speaker would provide the video footage to Julie Kelly, a writer at the right-wing site American Greatness. (Also involved here is John Solomon, a discredited right-wing media figure who spread political smears during Donald Trump’s first impeachment, and who is now working on Trump’s behalf in another scandal involving the disgraced former president’s mishandling of classified documents.)
Kelly further confirmed the news in her own tweet, thanking both Greene and McCarthy.
In one recent column, Kelly promoted Greene’s motion to impeach U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves, who Kelly has also attacked in her writings, for prosecuting January 6 defendants. In another column, Kelly denounced the sentences for seditious conspiracy by members of the Oath Keepers.
“They traveled to the nation’s capital to protest an election that by every measure was rigged to favor Joe Biden,” Kelly wrote, further describing Graves and the judge in the case as “arrogant, unaccountable apparatchiks of a bloodthirsty regime hellbent on crushing political dissent in America.”
Kelly has a long history of promoting unhinged conspiracy theories and election denial, including baseless accusations smearing police officers who were attacked on January 6, 2021.