WASHINGTON — Democrats continued to hit Fox News host Tucker Carlson and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) with staunch criticism on Wednesday over Carlson’s latest cherry-picked take on the deadly Jan. 6 attack.
“It’s deceptive and irresponsible,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D- MA) told TPM. “But that’s pretty much par for the course for Tucker Carlson.”
Warren also echoed Democrats’ long-standing warning that giving 40,000-plus hours of security footage – that includes paths for emergency exits and locations of security cameras – to Carlson and his team creates a serious threat to the security of the Capitol building and those who work there.
“It was a reckless move for Kevin McCarthy just to hand over all of that footage to his buddy at Fox News,” Warren added.
Carlson’s Monday night Jan. 6 segment — made up of selective security footage that created a painfully misleading narrative about the reality of the Capitol attack — was the first in a series of segments Carlson said he would roll out after getting exclusive access to over 40,000 hours of tape from McCarthy last month.
Carlson characterized the deadly Capitol riot as a “mostly peaceful chaos” and falsely claimed that the attack was nothing more than peaceful “sightseers” touring the Capitol building with police escorts.
“It’s shameful,” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) told TPM. “I thought it was so shameful that Jan. 6 happened and he just picked those aspects of the thousands of hours [of footage] to push out that these were just a group of tourists.”
“It’s such bullshit I can hardly stand it,” she added.
Carlson’s commentary has also sparked a firestorm of criticism from Republicans, leading many to denounce him publicly, including Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
It’s “really sad to see Tucker Carlson go off the rails like that,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) told reporters on Tuesday, according to NBC News, adding that Carlson is “joining a range of shock jocks that are disappointing America and feeding falsehoods.”
“The American people saw what happened on Jan. 6,” Romney said. “They’ve seen the people that got injured. They saw the damage to the building. You can’t hide the truth by selectively picking a few minutes out of tapes and saying this is what went on. It’s so absurd. It’s nonsense.”
“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,” he added. “And people saw that it was violent and destructive and should never happen again. But trying to normalize that behavior is dangerous and disgusting.”
