Alex Holder, a documentary filmmaker whose work chronicling the Trump team has previously figured in election-related investigations by the House riot panel and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia, has been subpoenaed by the Justice Department, demanding he provide all footage he and his team captured on January 6 in the nation’s capital city.
Holder has conducted multiple interviews with Trump himself, and a documentary he created focusing on the Trump campaign for re-election and some of the aftermath of the 2020 election was released earlier this year. On January 6, he filmed at the rally Trump held before the breach of the Capitol and amid the Capitol riot itself, perhaps suggesting that Justice Department prosecutors are interested in the possibility that Holder’s footage helps identify more of those who participated in the riot that the department would want to charge. A director of photography working on the eventually released Holder documentary was actually among those attacked amid the riot, where members of the mob also targeted equipment associated with journalists. Holder’s associate’s camera was damaged. New arrests of riot participants are continuing, including another of a Trump supporter who assaulted police and was picked up just this Wednesday by authorities.
Holder seems likely to comply with the Justice Department’s subpoena, which he evidently must do under the most recently agreed upon terms by the end of January. He complied with a riot committee subpoena, reasoning that the nature of the footage he held warranted such a move and that the documentary itself would be coming out relatively soon anyway. “For me, after having seen the sort of the public hearings and seeing the materials that had been presented, and me sort of having known the material we had, re: the events of January 6th… it didn’t sort of make sense to make a stand to not give it to them,” he said in June. “We had just finished the film. It was going to be coming out in a few months, and it sort of coincided with the subpoena coming in. Trying to fight that didn’t seem to make much sense, especially in light of the material we had captured.”
The riot panel is — as its work seemingly slowly draws to a close — working on preparing its final report and dealing with the question of potentially issuing further criminal referrals recommending prosecutions by the Justice Department. Members have also been involved in promoting legislative changes that would help avert a repeat of some of the same threats seen last year. Among other examples is an increase the House evidently passed to the number of members required from each chamber for support of a challenge to electoral votes before it moves forward to debate and a vote during the proceedings to formally certify presidential election results.
