Eat their own....

My Pillow Guy vows to sue Kevin McCarthy over Jan. 6 security footage

Mike Lindell said McCarthy's decision to give Tucker Carlson exclusive access to the footage violates the U.S. Constitution

Alec Regimbal

My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell has vowed to sue House Speaker and California Rep. Kevin McCarthy over his decision to share more than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol exclusively with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, according to a report from The Hill. 

The news that McCarthy shared that footage — some of which has never been aired publicly — with Carlson alone has sparked mixed reactions. CNN reported that, while generally supportive of making the footage public, some Republican leaders have concerns about what it would reveal to other countries about security inside the Capitol. Top Democrats in Congress also cited security concerns and blasted McCarthy for sharing the footage exclusively with Carlson — a media personality who has repeatedly downplayed official accounts of the Jan. 6 attack. 

Lindell, appearing on an edition of Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast last week, claimed McCarthy's actions violated the First Amendment’s freedom of the press provision and the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. He said his streaming service — Lindell-TV — plans to sue the speaker over it.

“We’re not gonna sit back and let that happen,” Lindell reportedly told Bannon, a former Trump administration official. “Why does just Fox get this? So they can cover it up even more? It’s disgusting. All of us, including War Room, we all need to see what’s on those tapes, and we need to see all of them.”

Here, Lindell — a noted conspiracy theorist who became infamous for hawking unsubstantiated cures for COVID-19 and attempting to help overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election — makes a surprisingly salient point, though perhaps accidentally. Fox News has come under fire in recent weeks after a trove of text messages and emails from senior executives and hosts at the network were made public, revealing that many on-air employees chose not to disclose what they believed to be the truth about the 2020 election results for fear that it might alienate viewers.

Several prominent news outlets, including the Associated Press, New York Times and Washington Post, penned a letter to McCarthy last week urging him to make the footage available to outlets other than Fox. McCarthy has been mostly mum on his decision to share the footage with Fox but did defend himself in an interview with the New York Times last week, saying that making the footage public was something he had promised to do if his colleagues elected him speaker. 

“I promised,” McCarthy said. “I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment.”