Much of the evidence consists of video footage captured by Capitol police's closed-circuit television system during the breach of the building.
Now Graves is under pressure from all sides to make the video footage public.
"The Press Coalition agrees with the Speaker. Now that the CCTV videos have been released to one member of the news media-one whose program is categorized by its own network as opinion programming-they must be released to the rest of the news media as well." To bolster its request, the group filed FOIAs with the executive office of the U.S. attorneys and the FBI seeking copies of the videos.
In discrediting the Justice Department's insistence that releasing the CCTV recordings would pose a security threat, the press coalition noted that the government had no such "Security" concerns when video clips were aired during Trump's second impeachment and by the January 6 select committee during televised hearings.
"Because the public already has access to an enormous volume of CCTV videos from inside the Capitol, the Government likewise cannot demonstrate that permitting Defendant to republish other CCTV videos would pose any further threat to the security of the Capitol," the group's lawyers wrote in the March 23 filing.
The full trove of video, Graves argued, isn't a "Judicial" record so media access should be limited; only clips produced as evidence in specific cases would qualify as such.
"Nor does the narrower request to obtain a CCV clip here or there somehow transmute press access to thousands of hours of video in the government's holding." Graves' claims are, of course, absurd.
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