WASHINGTON — It was no mystery what Tucker Carlson would do with exclusive access to hours of surveillance footage from January 6, 2021.
The Fox News host long ago claimed that videos from that day showed the horde of Donald Trump supporters acting peacefully.
“You see people walking around and taking photos”, Carlson told his millions of viewers in September 2021. “They don’t look like terrorists, they look like tourists, and by the way, they’re all Americans.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) recently gave Carlson the full video file from inside the Capitol, and on Monday, the host stated that the images definitively confirmed your preview.
“These were not insurgents,” Carlson said. “They were tourists.”
It’s an outrageously false claim, and so far this week, McCarthy has taken pains to avoid saying whether he agrees.
“I don’t know what Tucker Carlson said,” McCarthy told reporters Tuesday.
It’s hard to believe that McCarthy’s staff didn’t at least inform the speaker about what Carlson did with all that video. McCarthy is more likely familiar with the show, but he would simply prefer not to discuss it, since disagreeing with Carlson could anger the far-right House Republicans who helped McCarthy win the speaker’s gavel.
On Wednesday, McCarthy declined to tell reporters if he was familiar with Carlson’s recent broadcast downplaying the attack on the Capitol. He ignored a question from HuffPost about whether he still considered January 6, 2021, to have been a “violent insurrection,” as he put it. he said he did it last year.
More than 500 people have pleaded guilty to federal charges for what they did that day, including 60 who have pleaded guilty to attacking police. Nearly 220 people have been sentenced to prison time so far, according to the Department of Justice.
Meanwhile, House Republicans are planning several counterinvestigations into the federal response to the riot on Capitol Hill. CNN reported Tuesday that a panel of the House Administration Committee will launch two investigations: one into the security breach that led to the attack and another into the special ad hoc committee that investigated the riot last year.
And members of the House Oversight Committee are preparing to send the DC jail a formal request for a tour of the facility where some January 6 suspects are being held awaiting trial.
“We’re going to look at the conditions in the jail,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a committee member, told HuffPost, adding that she was concerned about “human rights abuses” inside the jail. notorious facility.
Greene has described those accused of the Capitol riots as “political prisoners” and repeatedly tried to draw attention to their plight. She told HuffPost that there were “a lot” of defendants on Jan. 6 being held in the DC jail who had not been charged with violent crimes and should have been released before their trials.
A spokesperson for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which oversaw the Jan. 6 cases, told HuffPost that as of Wednesday, there were roughly two dozen Capitol siege defendants in pretrial detention.
“Nearly all of these defendants are charged with aggressive conduct and none are charged with only misdemeanors,” the spokesperson said.
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the second-ranking Republican in the House after McCarthy, suggested that investigating the jail would not be a priority.
“I don’t know if that’s going to be something that, there are a few different committees that are looking at a number of things not just related to 9/6, and looking at some of these agencies that abused their power,” Scalise said. HuffPost.
Like McCarthy, Scalise avoided saying whether he agreed with Carlson that the riot at the Capitol had actually been peaceful, instead praising McCarthy’s decision to release the material.
“The bottom line is that there is finally transparency,” Scalise said.
