The condemnation of Fox News host Tucker Carlson's airing of January 6 security video has come under fire not only by the left, but from several Republican senators as well.
“I think it’s bull****,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., told reporters in the Capitol hallways on Tuesday.
Carlson on Monday night showed video edited from 41,000 hours of footage taken that day that was given exclusively to him by GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The video Carlson showed only included nonviolent people walking through the Capitol with Carlson comparing them to "tourists."
“I was here. I was down there and I saw maybe a few tourists, a few people who got caught up in things," Tillis said. "But when you see police barricades breached, when you see police officers assaulted, all of that … if you were just a tourist you should’ve probably lined up at the visitors’ center and came in on an orderly basis."
Carlson plans to show more video on his show Tuesday.
"I was here. It was not peaceful. It was an abomination," Sen. John Kennedy," R-La." told CNN's Manu Raju. "You’re entitled to believe what you want in America, but you can’t resort to violence to try to convince others of your point of view."
"I thought it was an insurrection at that time. I still think it was an insurrection today," Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., told CNN.
Rounds was replying to Carlson's words from Monday night when he said, "The footage does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress. Instead, it shows police escorting people through the building."
"To somehow put that in the same category as a permitted peaceful protest is just a lie," Sen. Kevin Cramer," R-N.D., said.
"The best thing to do is to give it to every source at the same time and let everybody go through it and play it in its entirety, "Cramer said of McCarthy giving the footage only to Carlson, "and then avoid the political opinions versus just looking at the facts.
"It’s a very dangerous thing to do, to suggest that attacking the Capitol of the United States is in any way acceptable and it’s anything other than a serious crime, against democracy and against our country,” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah said. “And people saw that it was violent and destructive and should never happen again. But trying to normalize that behavior is dangerous and disgusting.”
"I think it was an attack on the Capitol. … There were a lot of people in the Capitol at the time that were scared for their lives," Senate Minority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., said.
"The point is, what happened that day shouldn’t have happened," Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, added.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said it was a mistake for Fox News to depict the footage as it did — at odds with what he and others witnessed firsthand at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
"So, that’s my reaction to it. It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that is completely at variance with what our Chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks," McConnell said.
"Clearly the chief of the Capitol Police, in my view, correctly described what most of us witnessed firsthand on Jan. 6,” he said
In the roughly 30-minute segment, Fox distilled the thousands of hours of footage of the gruesome scenes at the Capitol that day and did show some of the hand-to-hand combat as rioters laid siege to the building, broke windows and kicked down doors to gain entry.
But Carlson also emphasized imagery of the invaders, some in combat gear and wielding flagpoles, merely milling about the gilded halls, taking pictures of the surroundings during pauses in the hours-long attack.
“These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers,” Carlson said.
The footage he aired focused on one of the highest-profile rioters, Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman,” garbed in his horned hat and bare chested, as he poked around the building, officers standing by or opening doors. Chansley pleaded guilty to a felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding and was sentenced to 41 months in prison.
Carlson denounced the Jan. 6 committee led by Democrats in the past Congress, and called out Trump's chief Republican critics Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger as liars on the panel.
Former President Donald Trump and some GOP members of Congress have called on a reversal of criminal charges for those being prosecuted in the attack, many of whom have pleaded guilty and said they regretted their actions on Jan. 6.
Capitol Police officers who were defending against the mob have testified to their harrowing experiences — one said she was slipping in other people's blood, while another told of being crushed in the mob — as they worked and ultimately failed to block the rioters from storming the Capitol.
The criminal cases stemming from the riot have laid bare the violence. Officers have testified in court about being chased, hit, dragged and scared for their lives as they tried to defend the Capitol. One tweeted images late Monday of his cuts, stitches and swollen bruises from that day.
Among those who died in the riot and its aftermath were Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt who was shot by police and Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick who died after fighting the mob.
Carlson aired footage of Sicknick inside the Capitol picking up posters and politely ushering protesters out the door, portraying that as evidence the officer was not killed in the crush.
That last was denounced by Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger as “the most disturbing accusation from last night."
“The Department maintains, as anyone with common sense would, that had Officer Sicknick not fought valiantly for hours on the day he was violently assaulted, Officer Sicknick would not have died the next day,” Chief Manger said in a memo to his police force.
He said the program “cherry-picked” from calmer moments of the day, ignoring “the chaos and violence that happened before or during.”
The Sicknick family said in a statement that the footage simply showed that Brian Sicknick bravely resumed his duties for a time after he had been attacked by a chemical agent.
Ken Sicknick, Brian Sicknick’s brother, said in an interview that the family is “at a loss” about how to fight back against a network with millions of viewers and the speaker of the House who gave access to the footage.
Law enforcement failures on Jan. 6 have been investigated in Congress and acknowledged: Police failed to heed signs of a looming attack and were slow to provide an adequate response, including reinforcement from the National Guard.
Nearly 1,000 people have been charged by the Justice Department in the siege, with members of the extremist Proud Boys and Oath Keepers groups facing rare charges of sedition for their roles at the front of the assault. Several members of the Oath Keepers have been found guilty of sedition.
Most of the defendants face lesser misdemeanor charges for having been on hand during the siege.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.