Republicans’ anger after TV host Tucker Carlson calls Capitol riot ‘sightseeing’

Tucker Carlson hits back, accusing the congressional panel that investigated the riot of editing video for propaganda purposes.

Mitch McConnell holds up a letter from the US Capitol Police as he denounces Tucker Carlson's coverage of the January 6, 2021 attack. Picture: AFP

Senior Republicans have ­denounced a description of ­Donald Trump supporters who invaded the US Capitol as “sightseers” by a Fox News host granted access to security videos.

The outcry against Tucker Carlson’s revisionist presentation of the riot on January 6, 2021, as a mainly orderly protest was called a “mistake” by Mitch McConnell, the party leader in the Senate. He was echoed by several other ­Republican senators.

Carlson hit back, describing his broadcast as “good for this country” and accusing the congressional committee that investigated the riot of “selectively editing video for propaganda purposes”.

The Democrats are furious at the release of 41,000 hours of video by House of Representatives speaker Kevin McCarthy to Carlson while withholding it from other media. They see it as an attempt to undermine the conclusions of the congressional committee that the January 6 event was an insurrection and that Mr Trump “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack”.

It recommended Mr Trump should face criminal charges and Mr McCarthy and others should be subject to a congressional ethics investigation “about their ­advance knowledge of and role in President Trump’s plan to prevent the peaceful transition of power”.

Mr McCarthy said he did not regret releasing the images to Carlson. “I said at the very beginning: transparency. What I wanted to produce for everyone was exactly what I said so people could look at it and see what went on,” he said.

Carlson, 53, who regularly has the most-watched evening show on cable news channels with 3.5 million viewers, showed previously unseen video of Capitol police apparently escorting Jacob Chansley – the protester also known as the QAnon Shaman – through mostly quiet corridors and even trying locked doors for him.

Carlson said only a small number of those who illegally entered the Capitol were “hooligans” but the overwhelming majority were not. “They were peaceful, they were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionists, they were sightseers,” he said. Chansley pleaded guilty to obstructing an official proceeding and was sentenced to 41 months in prison.

Senate Democrat leader Chuck Schumer called Carlson’s report “a dangerous, unforgivable attempt to destabilise our democracy and rewrite the history of the worst attack on our constitution since the Civil War”.

Carlson, in response, told viewers: “We felt it was a public service to bring what we could to you.”

He claimed the videos showed Brian Sicknick, a policeman who died the next day after being sprayed with a chemical repellent by a rioter, “walking around the building apparently in good health after he was supposedly killed”. The Sicknick family said it showed how he bravely resumed his duties for a time after he had been ­attacked with a chemical agent.

The Times