Several Republican senators had choice words for Tucker Carlson after he aired the first of multiple segments on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, with one calling the Fox News host’s portrayal of events “bulls***.”
Carlson claimed that his exclusive access to security footage from the day of the riot showed not a “deadly insurrection“ but “mostly peaceful chaos” and that “very little about Jan. 6 was organized or violent.”
The footage, pulled from tens of thousands of hours of footage Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) handed over to Carlson, aired Monday on his popular nightly program.
“I think it’s bulls***,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) told CNN. “And I saw maybe a few tourists, a few people who got caught up and things … but when you see police barricades breached, when you see police officers assaulted, all of that … if you were just a tourist, you should have probably lined up at the Visitor Center and came in on an orderly basis. I just don’t think it’s helpful.”
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told the outlet, “To somehow put that in the same category as a permitted peaceful protest is just a lie.”
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) said more outlets than just Fox, which got exclusive access to the footage, should be able to review the surveillance video, adding, “I thought it was an insurrection at that time. I still think it was an insurrection today.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) called Carlson’s portrayal “very dangerous.”
“It’s a very dangerous thing to do to suggest that attacking the Capitol, the U.S., is in any way acceptable and is anything other than a serious crime, against democracy and against our country. … But trying to normalize that behavior is dangerous and disgusting,” Romney told Politico.
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Two of the apparent revelations from the first episode were that a widely mocked clip of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) running out of the Capitol didn’t show the dozens of other senators who fled moments before him and that, according to Carlson, some of the first protesters through the door were escorted by Capitol Police through the building.
McCarthy was hit with an ethics complaint for sharing the 41,000 hours of footage only with Fox News. McCarthy said other outlets would be granted access after Carlson’s team was done sifting through the video.
