Tuesday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson responded to the backlash from Democrats and the media over recently unreleased January 6 Capitol footage depicting a slightly different picture than what had been portrayed over the past two years.
Carlson called the reaction from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and other media figures to be a fear and panic.
Partial transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Last night, we aired video from surveillance cameras on Capitol Hill. That video was recorded 26 months to the day before January 6, 2021, and for 26 months, that footage was held from the American public. The January 6 Committee made certain.
Now, the Justice Department also kept a lid on that video footage and in fact, in some cases, DOJ did not share it with criminal defendants who had been charged on January 6, in violation of their constitutional rights.
So, we felt it was a public service to bring what we could to you. There was no justification for keeping the secret any longer and a powerful argument to be made that sunlight is always and everywhere the best disinfectant and in fact, because it was video evidence, it is to some extent self-explanatory.
Anyone could look at the tape and decide what he or she thinks of it.
So, the tape we showed last night indicated very clearly that Capitol Hill Police in some cases escorted protesters through the Capitol as if they were giving a tour. They did that with Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman. At one point, they even tried to open locked doors on Chansley’s behalf.
Chansley was sentenced to four years in prison for his crimes in the Capitol on January 6th and the video we showed you last night raises the obvious question: Why? On what grounds?
The video we showed you last night also showed that Officer Brian Sicknick was not beaten to death with a fire extinguisher by protesters on January 6th as the media and Liz Cheney so often claimed. The video shows Sicknick walking around the building, apparently in good health, after he was supposedly killed.
We showed you that video. You can make of it what you will.
We also showed you video that proves Ray Epps, the mysterious protester who encouraged others to breach the Capitol, lied to the January 6 Committee about where he was on that day, but for some reason, the Committee protected him anyway. He was not considered an insurrectionist. He was their ally.
So, once again, you can draw whatever conclusions you like from that video. We have ours and we shared them with you, but it’s really beyond debate that it is good for this country for Americans to be able to see it.
The media and politicians, the people in charge, have talked about January 6th every day since it happened for 26 months, and so at some point, the evidence should be presented to the public.
In free countries, governments do not lie about protests as a pretext to gain more power for themselves. They don’t selectively edit videos for propaganda services and then lie about them in fake hearings and show trials, but that’s exactly what happened and every Member of Congress should ask why that happened.
But Democrats in the Senate, the Democratic leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, is not asking why. Instead, Chuck Schumer went on the Senate floor today to explode, and to say that showing that video, evidence of wrongdoing by the Federal government, including the security forces, the police department that Nancy Pelosi personally controlled, letting the public see any of that is a threat to democracy. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): Last night, millions of Americans tuned in to one of the most shameful hours we have ever seen on cable television.
FOX News host, Tucker Carlson, ran a lengthy segment last night arguing the January 6 Capitol attack was not a violent insurrection.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a primetime cable news anchor manipulate his viewers the way Mr. Carlson did last night. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an anchor treat the American people and American democracy with such disdain.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “There’s nothing that shameful that has ever appeared on American television in the history of the media,” and so on the basis of that, the self-evident outrage of showing the public video that it paid for and has a right to see, Chuck Schumer called for the censorship of that video — any information, and he did not dispute that it was accurate — that damages the storyline his party constructed and used must be squelched. And Schumer is explicit on that point.
Because that video contradicted lies told by the Democratic Party — Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — Chuck Schumer demanded that our bosses pull this show off the air.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SCHUMER: He is going to come back tonight with another segment. FOX News should tell him not to. FOX News, Rupert Murdoch — tell Carlson not to run a second segment of lies.
I urge FOX News to order Carlson to cease propagating the Big Lie on his network and to level with their viewers about the truth — the truth behind the efforts to mislead the public. Conduct like theirs is just asking for another January 6 to happen.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “It’s a threat to democracy. Pull him off the air.” A couple of obvious observations: You don’t often see the Senate majority leader openly call for censorship on the floor of the Senate as if that was totally normal and didn’t contradict the spirit and the letter of the First Amendment, but of course it does.
But what’s really happening here? What you’re seeing is hysteria, the overstatement, the crazed hyperbole, the red-in-the-face anger. What is that? Well, it’s not outrage, of course. It’s fear. It’s panic.
Those videos, which we did not retouch, which we brought to you after running everyone by the Capitol Police to make certain that we didn’t imperil anybody, and we told you that last night, those videos touch a nerve because they’re a threat to the lies that Chuck Schumer has been telling for the last 26 months, and not just Chuck Schumer.
We should also tell you that Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, was joined in this outrage by the Senate minority leader and that would be a Republican, Mitch McConnell, and they were joined by a cascade of other Republicans — Thom Tillis from North Carolina, Mitt Romney from Utah — all sharing the same outrage, and from this, we learn two things.
One: You’re getting close to what they really care about, and you have to ask yourself why? Why is it so important that they would degrade themselves by telling such obvious lies and calling for censorship? Why? What are they trying to protect? That might be worth exploring, and we plan to.
And the second thing that we learn from this is that they’re on the same side. The Senate majority leader joins the Senate minority leader — Thom Tillis, Mitt Romney. They’re all on the same side.
So, it’s actually not about left and right. It’s not about Republican and Democrat. Here you have people with shared interests, the open borders people, the people like Mitch McConnell, who are living in splendor on Chinese money, the people who underneath it all have everything in common are all aligned against everyone else, and that would include almost all news organizations in this country as well.
And so, if you’re watching this, it might be kind of interesting to keep a list, because one thing we learned today is that they’re all in agreement with each other. They kind of outed themselves.
They sort of showed their membership cards in whatever club this is to the public, so keep a list. If you want to know who’s actually aligned, despite the illusion of partisanship, we found out today.
We have a little more tape for you tonight. So, if you take three steps back, you may notice that the one person really who was never blamed for anything that happened on January 6 was the very same person who was in charge of the police force, the Capitol Hill police, that was charged with securing safety on January 6, and that person was Nancy Pelosi.
So, if there was a security failure on January 6, and demonstrably there was, it was probably Nancy Pelosi’s fault, and after looking at thousands of hours of footage, we came to the conclusion that many others have reached, which is the Capitol Police were not prepared for what happened, and that’s fascinating when you think about it, because there was ample warning.
The Federal Intel and law enforcement agencies knew perfectly well there could be a massive disturbance at the Capitol, but the frontline officers on duty that day didn’t know and yet, the people who kept that information from the frontline officers were overwhelmed by thousands of people milling around the Capitol Building? The people who fell down on the job, who didn’t do their job, they were not punished. They were rewarded, and you have to ask yourself, why is that?
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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