Tucker Carlson cherry-picked a few minutes of Jan. 6 footage out of the more than 40,000 hours Kevin McCarthy gave him exclusive access to, used it to create a false narrative in which the mob attacking the U.S. Capitol was actually a bunch of peaceful sightseers and Jacob Chansley—now serving 41 months in prison—was an innocent bystander, cordially escorted about by friendly police officers.
New footage released in relation to a criminal case shows—yet again—how false that portrayal is, and how close to danger some members of Congress came. In the video, Sen. Chuck Grassley, who was at the time third in line for the presidency, can be seen being evacuated by a security detail just feet away from the mob. Bear in mind, this is not security footage. It was taken by a member of the mob, highlighting just how close things were.
RELATED FOOTAGE: Kevin McCarthy gave Tucker Carlson Jan. 6 footage. Carlson went big with his lies
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Grassley and his security detail are seen hurrying away as a uniformed officer stands in a doorway separating them from the shouting crowd. Also seen in this video are Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola, whose lawyer tried to get the case against him thrown out on the basis of Carlson’s false portrayal of Jan. 6, and Chansley, in his very visible horned hat.
Carlson showed Chansley wandering around on his own, stripped of the important context of having been one of the first people into the Capitol after windows were bashed in and people who entered through those windows forced a door open from the inside. But here, he’s surging along with the mob. And Pezzola is, whether he knew it or not at the time, within sight of a senior U.S. senator.
McCarthy and Carlson wanted to change the story about Jan. 6, wiping out the reality of a violent attack on not just the Capitol as a building but also the functioning of Congress at the moment it certified Donald Trump’s election loss, replacing that reality with a fairytale in which, in Carlson’s words, the attackers “were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionists, they were sightseers. Footage from inside the Capitol overturns the story you’ve heard about January 6. Protesters queue up in neat little lines. They give each other tours outside the speaker’s office. They take cheerful selfies, and they smile. They’re not destroying the Capitol; they obviously revere the Capitol. They’re there because they believe the election was stolen from them. They believe in the system.”
That’s the lie Tucker Carlson and Kevin McCarthy want people to believe. In reality, as U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell testified to the Jan. 6 committee, “My fellow officers and I were punched, pushed, kicked, shoved, sprayed with chemical irritants and even blinded with eye-damaging lasers by a violent mob who apparently saw us law enforcement officers, dedicated to ironically protecting them as U.S. citizens, as an impediment in their attempted insurrection.”
Officer Harry Dunn described a similar scene, telling the committee, “I witnessed the rioters using all kinds of weapons against the officers, including flag poles, metal bike racks they had torn apart, and various kinds of projectiles. Officers were being bloodied in the fighting, many were screaming, and many were blinded and coughing from chemical irritants being sprayed in their faces. I gave decontamination aid to as many officers as I could, flushing their eyes with water to dilute the chemical irritants.”
That’s the reality of what came within sight of Grassley, within 40 feet of Mike Pence, within sight of then-Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
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