Tucker Carlson widely critized for Jan 6 portrayel

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Senate Republicans on Tuesday refuted Fox News host Tucker Carlson's portrayal of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, saying his characterization of the events as "mostly peaceful" is at odds with the reality they experienced as a mob of former President Donald Trump's supporters breached the building.

During the Monday night broadcast of his primetime show "Tucker Carlson Tonight," the Fox News host aired selected snippets from of 41,000 hours of footage from the Capitol that day.

Carlson claimed surveillance video from the scene showed "mostly peaceful chaos" inside the Capitol. While a "small percentage" of the rioters were "hooligans" who committed vandalism, he said, most were "orderly and meek," and he equated them with "sightseers."

But some Senate Republicans pushed back on Carlson's depiction. Members of the House and Senate were evacuated from their respective chambers when the rioters forced their way into the building, knocking over barricades and forcing their way past police in an attempt to stop the counting of state electoral votes.

"When you come into the chambers, when you start opening members' desks, when you stand up in their balcony, to somehow put that in the same category as permitted protest is just a lie," Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota told reporters.

Cramer said his recollection of Jan. 6 was "that it was not just some rowdy protest of Boy Scouts," and those who participated in the attack should be held accountable.

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina called Carlson's claims "bulls**t."

"I was down there, and I saw maybe a few tourists, a few people who got caught up in things," he said. "But when you see police barricades breached, when you see police officers assaulted, all of that, or you had to be in close proximity to it, 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. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said that the events of Jan. 6 were "an attack on the Capitol."

"There were a lot of people in the Capitol at the time who I think were scared for their lives," he said.

Carlson was given access to the trove of 41,000 hours of police and surveillance footage from Jan. 6 by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. CBS News is part of a group of media organizations demanding access to the tranche of videos from the attack.

McCarthy has defended his agreement with Carlson and Fox News regarding the video, telling reporters last week that he gave the network exclusive access and then will "give it out to the entire country."

Still, Carlson's depiction of Jan. 6 has been met with widespread criticism, including from the chief of the U.S. Capitol Police, Thomas Manger, who wrote in a letter to his department that the Fox News broadcast was "filled with offensive and misleading conclusions."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, holding a copy of Manger's letter during a press conference on Capitol Hill, said "I want to associate myself entirely with the opinion of the chief of the Capitol police about what happened."

"Clearly the chief of the Capitol Police in my view correctly describes what most of us witnessed firsthand on January 6," McConnell said. "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 thinks."

Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters in response to Carlson's claims that "it's very clear" what took place.

"All Americans saw what happened on Jan. 6, and most of us saw it as it was happening," he said. "It was a violent attack on a fundamental tenet of American democracy, that power is peacefully transferred from one administration to another."

While Carlson described the rioters as "sightseers" who were not destroying the Capitol but "revere" it, a number wielded weapons like Tasers, tomahawk axes, crowbars, flagpoles, baseball bats, chemical sprays and fire extinguishers, according to court filings.

During a June hearing of the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, a top Secret Service official listed weapons found on attendees outside Trump's Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse. They included knives, pistols, rifles and spears on the end of flag poles, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

The family of U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died following the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, rebuked Fox News and host Tucker Carlson after he aired selected unseen footage of the attack to falsely claim the media and congressional investigators misled the public about the events, including the circumstances of Sicknick's death.

In a statement provided to CBS News, Sicknick's family said they are "outraged at the ongoing attack" by Fox News and accused Carlson of cherry-picking footage from the Jan. 6 riot that "supports his delusional views that" it was peaceful.

"Every time the pain of that day seems to have ebbed a bit, organizations like Fox rip our wounds wide open again and we are frankly sick of it," the Sicknick family said.

They accused Fox News of doing the bidding of former President Donald Trump and "his sycophant followers," while ignoring the damage done to families of U.S. Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police officers who were harmed on Jan. 6 by the violent mob of Trump's supporters who breached the building in an attempt to thwart the transfer of presidential power.

"FOX has shown time and time again that they are little more than the propaganda arm of the Republican Party and like Pravda, will do whatever they are told to keep the hatred and the lies flowing while suppressing anything resembling the truth," the family said. "Fox does this not for any sense of morality as they have none, but for the quest for every penny of advertising money they can get from those who buy airtime from them."

During his broadcast Monday, Carlson called the events of Jan. 6 "mostly peaceful chaos" and the majority of rioters who unlawfully entered the Capitol "sightseers" who were "orderly and meek." A small percentage of those who descended on the Capitol, Carlson claimed, were "hooligans" who committed vandalism.

The Fox host also showed surveillance footage of an officer, purported to be Sicknick, walking through the Capitol looking "healthy and vigorous." Sicknick's death, he claimed, "was not the result of violence he suffered" at the Capitol.

The D.C. medical examiner's office said Sicknick died of natural causes after suffering from two strokes at the base of his brainstem caused by a clot in an artery and noted that "all that transpired played a role in his condition," a reference to Sicknick responding to the mob at the Capitol.

Two men were charged in 2021 with assaulting Sicknick and accused of using chemical spray on the line of officers, Sicknick among them, attempting to protect the Capitol. One of the men, Julian Khater, admitted to spraying Sicknick and was sentenced to 80 months in prison in January. The second man, George Tanios, pleaded guilty to lesser charges and was ordered to 12 months supervised release.

Khater of New Jersey, who was accused of deploying chemical spray at Sicknick, pleaded guilty to two federal charges. The Sicknick family spoke at Khater's sentencing hearing.

Sickcnick's family said Carlson downplayed the situation at the Capitol and the efforts of U.S. Capitol and Metropolitan police who were outnumbered and "literally fighting for their very lives."

"One officer, Brian Sicknick, lost that fight the following day and several more officers lost that fight in the following weeks," they said. "On video, Officer Sicknick looks like he managed to shake off the chemical irritants and resume his duties. That he did, but his sense of duty and incredible work ethic were the driving force which sent him back in spite of his injuries and no doubt contributed to his succumbing to his injuries the following day."

How is this scumbag not fired?

Ohh right... he's part of the close-knitted GQP cult in FOX News.

This is what he is being "widely criticized" for:

What you did was terrible. You made yourself the epitome of the riot. You didn’t slug anybody, but what you did here was actually obstruct the functioning of the whole government. It’s a serious crime.

He follows the motto that if you keep repeating a lie then the masses might eventually believe it

Frankly I think what Trump's mob did on January 6th was worst seeing how as they tried to overthrow the freakin government.

They should have all been treated as the traitors and terrorists they are and sent off to Guantanamo Bay. Most of them got off easy with only a few years in prison and Trump was never held accountable for this.

There really is no real justice in this country.

https://www.nysun.com/article/new-video-footage-could-be-legal-magic-for-qanon-shaman

New Video Footage Could Be Legal Magic for ‘QAnon Shaman’

Attorney General Garland, in the wake of the disclosures of footage from government cameras showing the “QAnon Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, being guided through the Capitol by uniformed police on January 6, 2021, has an obligation to bring, if he hasn’t done so already, the evidence to the attention of Chansley’s lawyers and the court.

That is the opinion of one of America’s leading defense lawyers, Harvey Silverglate of Boston. “It is the legal obligation of the attorney general,” he told the Sun in an interview this morning, to furnish all material footage from the January 6 riot to those charged for their actions that day.

That obligation was ordained by the Supreme Court on several occasions and was insisted upon by Mr. Silverglate, who himself is representing President Trump’s attorney, John Eastman, in the criminal probe in Georgia. Nearly 1,000 persons have been charged in connection with the January 6 riot.

It is unclear at the moment what tapes were seen by Chansley, whose lawyer could not be reached by presstime. The release of the footage, though, has prompted a flurry of requests for trial delays from J6 defendants.

Was NEVER going to happen.
Buffalo horns against assault rifles?
Seriously?

Just because the police were initially (and bizarrely) giving Chansley (AKA QAnon shaman) a VIP guided tour doesn't give him free right to trespass into Nancy Pelosi's office, damage property and call for her to be "strung up".

The point is, that does not a coup make. It was always insulting to anyone of intelligence to portray it that way, now this footage has shown up everyone who pushed that lie and everyone who believed it for what they are: malicious and stupid respectively.

You might recall there was a report that members of the policeforce (not the ones stationed in the capitol building who were awarded bravery medals) were in cahoots with the rioters. Infact some of the GOP were taking rioters through the building prior to the storming of the capitol. There remains a question mark as to how high up was the GOP involvement in the riots that followed. Seeing Trump Jr fist pumping the air with his wife as they watched the stortming of the capitol building makes me wonder their level of complicity.

You can insist it was never going to happen, but that doesn't diminish that it was their goal.