House Republican Defends Blurring Out Faces of People on Jan 6 to Protect Them From ‘Insurrection Hunters’

Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) told right-wing network OAN that he supported Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) delaying the release of January 6 footage so his staff could “blur some of the faces” of rioters to protect “innocent” people from “insurrection hunters.”

On Tuesday, Johnson explained the need to censor the footage in order to protect people from being “retaliated against” and “charged by the [Department of Justice].” His spokesperson walked back those comments later in the day, saying that the protection was only against “non-governmental actors,” adding that the DOJ has the raw footage. But Johnson clearly said what he said, and he was criticized for looking like he wanted to cover for insurrectionists.

Loudermilk, however, also tried to specify that the protection was from “insurrection hunters,” civilians who have been combing through the footage to identify people who breached the Capitol and reporting them to law enforcement:

We also want to protect the privacy of certain individuals, especially those who are innocent, who may have been here at the Capitol. They didn’t do anything wrong. There are insurrection hunters out there that want to go and like, for instance, one of the people that visited my office was in this room right here on January 5th, did absolutely nothing wrong. But the January 6th committee let his name out and he got fired from a job even though he didn’t do anything wrong.

So there are people out there that if you were here in January 6th, in their mind you’re guilty, guilty of something. So we want to protect innocent people.

The Sedition Hunters state that their mission, as a “global community of open-source intelligence investigators,” is to find and report “individuals who committed crimes on Jan 6, 2021 at the United States Capitol” to the FBI and the Capitol Police. Over 1,100 people have been charged with crimes related to January 6, according to the DOJ.

Watch the video above via OAN.