Fox News host Tucker Carlson used surveillance video from inside the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, to falsely claim on his Monday show that there were no riots that day.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has given Carlson, a known denier since Jan. 6, access to more than 40,000 hours of security camera footage from which Carlson pulled minutes of Donald Trump supporters walking around leisurely through the Capitol.
“Taken as a whole, the video does not support the claim that Jan. 6 was an insurrection,” Carlson said. “It actually demolishes that claim.”
Supporters of then-President Trump fought with police officers and smashed windows to gain access to the Capitol, where they ransacked several offices, while lawmakers and staff barricaded themselves inside others. The rioters assaulted about 140 police officers, according to the Justice Department, and of the more than 1,000 people arrested in connection with the attack, 326 were charged with assault, resisting or obstructing officers or employees.
The former president sent his supporters to the Capitol after infuriating them with months of lies about stealing the 2020 election, which he capped that day with a combative speech outside the White House. Crowds stormed the Capitol as lawmakers met to certify election results in a procedure that is usually little more than a formality.
At one point, of course, there were corridors where not much was happening, so Carlson used footage of quieter scenes to argue that it represented the day’s events better than videos of rioters attacking the police.
“The crowd was huge,” Carlson said. “A small percentage of them were hooligans. They committed acts of vandalism. You’ve seen their photos over and over again. But the vast majority do not. They were peaceful. They were neat and kind. They were not rebels. They were visitors.”
Most visitors to the Capitol do not have to step over police barricades or broken windows to enter the building, and there are usually no loud explosions and screaming crowds. Several HuffPost reporters were in attendance on Jan. 6, and it’s hard to argue that the day was anything like a normal sightseeing trip.
But Carlson fixated on videos of police officers appearing to escort the so-called “QAnon Shaman” through the halls of the Senate, suggesting he and others should not be charged with the crimes. Capitol Police told the New York Post they were trying to defuse the situation because they were outnumbered that day.
McCarthy’s decision to turn over the footage to Carlson is a major escalation in the Republican effort to cast doubt on the insurgency, which McCarthy blamed on Trump in the early days after the attack before later trying to deflect responsibility from the former president. Anyway, McCarthy he said last year that he was okay with it the attack was a “violent insurrection”. With McCarthy’s help, Carlson insisted Monday night that not only was Jan. 6 not an insurrection, it wasn’t even a riot.
Carlson said Monday that Democrats suppressed the video evidence so they could lie about the riot as “a pretext for a federal crackdown on Washington’s one-party opponents.”
Carlson also claimed that Capitol Police “killed” a rioter named Ashli Babbitt while trying to enter a room adjacent to the House of Representatives chamber (McCarthy recently said the officer he did his job). And Carlson again claimed, without credible evidence, that undercover federal agents caused the hooliganism that occurred.
As for the nearly $3 million in damage caused by the riots that day, Carlson suggested they didn’t mean it.
“I’m not destroying the Capitol,” he said. “Obviously they love the Capitol.”
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