Several Republican U.S. Senators blasted Fox News’s top-rated host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday after he showed select footage from the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and suggested the day’s events were not particularly violent and that lawmakers who suggested otherwise had “lied” to the American public.
Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made clear at a press conference Tuesday that he stood with the Capitol Police chief, who vehemently condemned Carlson. “So, that’s my reaction to it. 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 here at the Capitol thinks,” McConnell said.
CNN’s Manu Raju spoke to various GOP Senate leaders who shot down Carlon’s attempts to downplay attacks on law enforcement that day. “To somehow put that in the same category as a permitted peaceful protest is just a lie,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told Raju.
Crame also weighed in on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) decision to exclusively give the footage to Carlson, who in the past has spun conspiracy theories claiming the Jan. 6th attack served to weaponize the federal government against Trump supporters in a controversial series called Patriot Purge.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) pulled no punches in declaring what he thought of Carlson’s Monday night broadcast.
“I think it’s bullshit,” Tillis told reporters.
“I was here. I was down there and I saw maybe a few tourists, a few people who got caught up in things. But when you see police barricades breached, when you see police officers assaulted, all of that … if you were just a tourist you should’ve probably lined up at the visitors’ center and came in on an orderly basis,” Tillis added.
(Excerpt) Read more in: Mediaite