Fox News host Tucker Carlson used surveillance video from inside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to make a false claim on Monday that there were no riots that day.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) gave Carlson, a well-known January 6 denialist, access to more than 40,000 hours of security camera footage from which Carlson cherry-picked a few minutes of Donald Trump supporters calmly walking through the Capitol.
“Taken as a whole, the video footage does not support the claim that January 6th was an uprising,” Carlson said. “In fact, it eliminates the claim.”
Supporters of President Trump at the time fought police officers and broke windows to gain access to the Capitol, where they destroyed several offices while lawmakers and staff barricaded others inside. The rioters attacked about 140 police officers, according to the Justice Department, and of the more than 1,000 people arrested in connection with the attack, 326 have been charged with assaulting, resisting or obstructing an officer or employee.
The former president sent supporters to the Capitol after months of lying about a stolen 2020 election, which he capped off with a combative speech the next day near the White House. Crowds stormed the Capitol as lawmakers met to certify election results in a process that is usually a mere formality.
At certain moments, there are always hallways where not much is happening, so Carlson uses footage of quieter scenes to claim that they better represent the day’s events than videos of rioters attacking police.
“The crowd was overwhelming,” Carlson said. “A small percentage of them are hooligans. They do vandalism. You’ve seen pictures of them over and over again. But the vast majority are not. They are peaceful. They are orderly and gentle. These are not rebels. They are tourists.”
Most tourists to the Capitol don’t have to go through police barricades or broken glass to get inside the building, and there are usually no explosions and screams. Some HuffPost reporters were on January 6, and it’s hard to claim that day in any way resembles a normal tourist visit.
But Carlson fixated on the video of the police officer seen to escort the so-called “QAnon Shaman” through the corridors of the Senate, suggesting that he and others should not have been charged with crimes. Capitol Police told the New York Post that they were trying to deescalate the situation because of the larger numbers that day.
McCarthy’s decision to hand over the tape to Carlson represents a major escalation of Republican efforts to cast doubt on the insurgency, which McCarthy blamed on Trump early in the attack before he tried to deflect responsibility from the former president. However, McCarthy said last year that agreed the attack was a “violent rebellion”. With the help of McCarthy, Carlson insisted on a night that not only January 6 was not an insurrection, it was not even a riot.
Carlson claimed on Monday that Democrats denied video evidence in order to lie about the riots as “a pretext for a federal crackdown on unipartisan opponents in Washington.”
Carlson also claimed that Capitol Police “killed” a rioter named Ashli Babbitt when she tried to enter a room next to the House of Representatives chamber (McCarthy said the officers dispersed). doing his job). And Carlson again claimed, without credible evidence, that undercover federal agents caused the hooliganism that occurred.
As for almost $ 3 million in damage rioters inflicted today, Carlson suggested they did not mean.
“They didn’t destroy the Capitol,” he said. “He clearly respects the Capitol.”