Fox News host Tucker Carlson is facing widespread backlash for downplaying the Jan. 6 Capitol riot during his prime-time program as “mostly peaceful chaos.”
The segment was the first of two installments Carlson planned for this week relying on security footage granted to him by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
But the right-wing personality was able to unite both Democrats and Republicans who expressed their outrage at his portrayal of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger, who rarely offers opinions on political issues, also slammed Carlson’s “offensive and misleading conclusions about the Jan. 6 attack.”
“The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video. The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments,” Manger wrote in a memo to lawmakers.
“Those of you who contributed to the effort to allow this country’s legislative process to continue know firsthand what actually happened.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) issued a scathing rebuke of Carlson and Fox on Tuesday, holding up a copy of the memo and saying he wanted to associate himself “with the opinion of the chief of the Capitol police about what happened on Jan. 6.”
“It was a mistake, in my view, [for] Fox News to depict this in a way completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official in the Capitol” described, McConnell said, according to The Hill.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called Carlson’s show “one of the most shameful hours we’ve seen on cable television,” saying he was “furious” with both Carlson and McCarthy. He called on Fox News and its owner Rupert Murdoch to tell Carlson to not run more footage on Tuesday evening.
“Speaker McCarthy has played a treacherous, treacherous game in catering to the far right,” Schumer said on the Senate floor on Tuesday.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who was one of the members on the Jan. 6 committee, is among those who have raised security concerns over the release of the footage, noting it could be used to map the Capitol and the evacuation path of lawmakers.
He called Carlson’s show and conspiracies about Jan. 6 pushed through his documentary a “central part of the GOP agenda and playbook as they try to get Donald Trump elected to the White House again.”
Though McCarthy said last week that footage released for broadcast would be subject to a Capitol Police security review, Capitol Police said it saw just one of the several clips that Carlson aired on Monday: An interior door that Carlson said was blurred as a result of security concerns.
“We repeatedly requested that any clips be shown to us first for a security review,” Capitol Police said. “So far we have only been given the ability to preview a single clip out of the multiple clips that aired.”
