(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was slammed on Thursday over her theatrical “escape” from the Capitol on January 6, 2021, following the recent release of video footage that she herself had long suppressed, Just the News reported.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was said to have supplied the footage to three trusted conservative media reporters: Just the News’s John Solomon, American Greatness’s Julie Kelly and a third, as-yet unidentified outlet.
Solomon’s first release was the damning footage of Pelosi, which showed her trailed by a camera crew through highly sensitive parts of the Capitol while her daughter Alexandra filmed a documentary.
Steven Sund, the former Capitol Police chief who departed shortly after Jan. 6, called out Pelosi for slowing the evacuation so her daughter could get phone footage.
Sund argued that if, in fact, Pelosi believed the threat—as she has long maintained in her hyperbolic rhetoric—she knowingly put her security team at risk in the process.
“When you look at the footage, what you need to realize is a protective detail is specifically for the protectee—you’re there, you’re protecting the protectee,” he said, adding that Capitol Police were obliged to protect Pelosi’s daughter as well.
“Now, Capitol Police statutorily do have the authority to protect family members,” he continued. “And it’s my understanding the person holding the camera was Pelosi’s daughter. But she’s there in the position of being media.”
Sund also noted that the attempts to film Pelosi’s exit further complicated Capitol Police attempts to get Pelosi into a vehicle for transportation to Fort McNair, a nearby military base.
“The protective detail isn’t there to protect media and whoever else was there with her for the sole purpose of videotaping creates a major distraction for the protective detail,” Sund told interviewers. “You know, they don’t train to protect those additional people.”
Moreover, in order to get more video footage, Alexandra Pelosi took the place of additional security personnel in the armored vehicle, adding to the existing chaos.
“There’s a limited number of seats in the armored vehicles that, you know, if you’re going to put one of those additional people into the armored personnel carrier, or the armored vehicle, you’re going to lose one of your security detail,” Sund said. “That’s not what’s meant to happen so it creates a distraction.”
Some of the footage was included in an HBO documentary that aired in December. Other exclusive footage of Pelosi’s “deliberations” during the uprising appeared as part of the glitzy, Hollywood-produced Jan. 6 commission hearings staged by a partisan committee hand-selected by Pelosi.
Alexandra herself was caught on tape admitting that much of the rhetoric surrounding the Jan. 6 uprising was, in fact, leftist political propaganda.
“If there was an insurrection… you were supposed to have a plan!” she said. “It was the sorriest insurrection in history.”
While she was filming in the Capitol, her husband, Dutch filmmaker Michiel Vos, was outside with the hoi poloi, where he notoriously took a selfie with Q’Anon Shaman Jacob Angeli.
Michiel Vos, Schoonzoon van Pelosi, onze man bij #Antifa. https://t.co/DCTEJRCoNW pic.twitter.com/qvgduKIwnb
— KatianaK aka Darya (@D62Darya) January 6, 2021
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.