Tucker Carlson’s January 6 Revisionist History

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, March 07, 2023

 

The riots in and around the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, might be the most extensively photographed act of mass violence in the nation’s history. And yet, there’s still more footage of the day’s events that the public had not yet seen — closed-circuit security camera footage from inside the Capitol, in fact, which House speaker Kevin McCarthy provided to Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson. On Monday night, Carlson played that footage for his viewers and claimed that it invalidates the notion that the attack on the Capitol Building was an attack at all.

 

The previously unseen footage, Carlson said, “from inside the Capitol overturns the story you’ve heard about January 6.” It “does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress,” he added. Rather, the footage is of revelers who “revere the Capitol.” The trespassers were “peaceful,” “ordinary,” and “meek.” If you have internalized some other perception of the day’s events, that’s only because you’re so easily manipulated. “By controlling the images that you were allowed to view from January 6, they controlled how the public understood that day,” Carlson declared. “They could lie about that day, and you would never know the difference.”

 

This monumental allegation is not supported by the facts Carlson presented. The footage of that day’s events confirms from discrete angles an account of events already well established by media outlets and congressional investigatory bodies.  If that account is unfamiliar to Fox viewers, that says more about the network and its priorities than the news outlets and institutions Carlson set out to indict.

 

The Fox host made several claims retailed as blockbuster revelations. The one Carlson appeared to think was the most damning involved footage of the so-called “Q Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, being escorted through the building by U.S. Capitol Police.

 

“To this day,” Carlson said, “there is dispute over how Chansley got into the Capitol Building.” But by whom? They would have to contend with footage already made public showing Chansley entering the building after a fellow rioter shattered and crawled through a window. Chansley testified to that.

 

Carlson went on to allege that police “helped him,” acting “as his tour guides.” At one point, Chansley is even escorted through a small cordon of officers, suggesting that the “Q Shaman” saw law enforcement “as his allies.” The New York Post draws the conclusion to which Carlson led it, citing a statement by USCP saying the overwhelmed officers were trying to “de-escalate” the situation. “But that does not explain why Chansley, who was unarmed, was able to walk past seven more officers without being apprehended,” the Post avers. Yes, it does.

 

This is hardly the only excruciatingly well-documented example of outmanned police officers calmly engaging with demonstrators, clearing the way for or corralling intruders in the Capitol complex, or retreating to more defensible terrain. Nor is this specific act of deference by Capitol Police officers remarkable. The Post later confirmed that the officer featured in Carlson’s footage, Officer Keith Robishaw, spoke with HBO documentarians about his experience with Chansley.

 

“The sheer number of them compared to us, I knew ahead there was no way we could all get physical with them,” Robishaw said. “I walked in behind [Chansley], and that is when I realized I am alone now. I was by myself.” Their extensive interaction in the Senate chamber, where Robishaw was surrounded by dozens of other disruptive demonstrators, was filmed up close by New Yorker correspondent Luke Mogelson. You can watch it here. Robishaw’s unheeded demands that the demonstrators evacuate the premises indicates, at the very least, that he was no one’s “tour guide.”

 

Carlson later asks “what did Chansley do” to deserve the months he’s already spent in a jail cell for his conduct on that day. The answer established in court by his guilty plea was criminal obstruction of a federal investigation, for which a judge sentenced him to the “low end” of the prison terms prescribed in federal sentencing guidelines: 41 months.

 

Suffice it to say the lone officer confronting Chansley was reduced to de-escalatory tactics, in part because his colleagues were engaged in a desperate attempt to secure his flank. That leads us to Carlson’s second contention: The attack on the Capitol was no “riot.”

 

“Very little about January 6 was organized or violent,” the Fox host maintains. “Surveillance video from inside the Capitol shows mostly peaceful chaos.” This is a contention that some Republican members of Congress have made citing available footage, to which the general public has supposedly never been privy.

 

“Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes taking videos and pictures,” said Representative Andrew Clyde during a 2021 Oversight Committee hearing. “You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January 6, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.” Again, this tortured interpretation of events rests on the assumption that viewers are unfamiliar with or willing to compartmentalize hours of footage demonstrating the extent of the ongoing violence on the Capitol steps.

 

For those with the requisite curiosity, ProPublica produced an impressive interactive database of footage of the Capitol riot that allows users to bounce in real time from events inside the Capitol to the Capitol steps and around the complex. Most of those videos were culled from posts provided by users of the pro-Trump social-media website Parler, which suggests the conspiracy to hide these videos from the public was spectacularly inept.

 

Those videos show hours of vicious hand-to-hand combat outside the building, the officers’ crowd-control efforts inside the building, and, yes, even the rare moments of relative placidity in areas like Statuary Hall and the Capitol Rotunda. Again, you can watch the footage for yourself (which the January 6 committee played) to determine just how reverential the demonstrators, some of whom called repeatedly for the hanging of American elected officials even in those moments of relative calm, really were.

 

Another of Carlson’s contentions is that U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was not, in fact, killed by demonstrators — and that, by contrast, one protester, Ashli Babbitt, was “murdered” by police.

 

He starts off on solid ground. As Carlson demonstrated, to his credit, the notion that Sicknick’s death was directly attributable to a physical assault was a misapprehension that mainstream-media outlets repeated for weeks after January 6. But by April 2021, the notion that Sicknick had succumbed to injuries he had suffered during the riot had been disproven by medical examiners.

 

Sicknick was “temporarily blinded,” according to an FBI affidavit, by a chemical spray wielded by an assailant. At 10 that night, Sicknick collapsed in the Capitol Building and died the next day in the hospital of a stroke. The cause of death was deemed “natural,” unrelated to the attack on the Capitol. That finding disputes preliminary claims that Sicknick was “struck in the head with a fire extinguisher,” which was widely reported in the weeks after the attack. Carlson’s testimony supports the contention that Sicknick was never assaulted with a fire extinguisher, a claim the New York Times retracted six weeks after the claim was published and without fanfare. If this sequence of events sounds unfamiliar, that may be attributable to the years that have passed since any of this occurred.

 

But Carlson accuses the January 6 committee of propagating the notion that Sicknick “was murdered,” which they knew full well to be a “lie” because CCTV footage he obtained shows the officer “walking around” before he had a fatal stroke. You can search in vain through the transcripts of all nine days of public testimony conducted by the January 6 committee for quotes from its members alleging that Sicknick was “murdered.” You won’t find any. One Capitol Police officer testified to Sicknick’s harrowing experience beating back rioters — a brutal and physically traumatic engagement similar to the experience endured by so many Capitol Police on that day. But neither the committee nor its witnesses misled viewers about the cause of Sicknick’s death.

 

Babbitt’s killing at the hands of law enforcement has also been exhaustively investigated. Once again, it’s all on video. You don’t need to take the Justice Department’s word for it; you need only refuse to gainsay the evidence of your own eyes.

 

Babbitt attempted to climb through an interior window, which demonstrators smashed, into the “Speaker’s Lobby,” a secure area of the Capitol. The protesters were warned by an officer with his gun drawn to not enter that area. When Babbitt ignored those warnings, U.S. Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Byrd fired one round, striking Babbitt in the shoulder. A USPC emergency-response team immediately administered medical aid and evacuated her from the building. She later died in the hospital.

 

The word “murder” has a legal context, and journalists are obliged to avoid using it when it is not applicable. Babbitt was not murdered, because the officer responsible for her death was found by prosecutors to have not violated applicable criminal statutes, nor did he commit a violation of Babbitt’s civil rights. It’s possible to be skeptical of these conclusions, but that skepticism does not license the misuse of a term that describes the “unlawful killing of a human being with malice.” Conflating these terms, at best, misleads viewers. At worst, it is a deliberate effort to agitate and inflame.

 

The January 6 committee is not beyond criticism. Indeed, its members deserve it. Carlson touched on some legitimate avenues of critique — like the committee’s decision to feature Senator Josh Hawley running from protesters, as though he was the only member of Congress fleeing for his life. It was a cheap shot, just like the committee’s decision to feature General Mike Flynn taking advantage of his Fifth Amendment privileges when asked if he believes in “the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America.” Like most under questioning who take advantage of that right, Flynn likely declined to answer every question he was asked similarly so as not to invalidate that right. But Carlson doesn’t seem satisfied to accuse political partisans of behaving like political partisans. They must be willful conspirators themselves.

 

Carlson went on to allege that a “mysterious” Arizona man named Ray Epps egged on some of the protesters to invade the Capitol and later boasted that he “orchestrated” the protests, and that he “lied” in testimony to the January 6 committee about the time at which he left the demonstrations. The video evidence Carlson provided purports to prove that. Carlson alleges that Democratic members of the committee “defended” Epps, though that, too, does not appear in transcripts of committee proceedings. A spokesman for the committee did, however, note that Epps testified in interviews with the committee that he was not “working with or acting at the direction of any law-enforcement agency.” The implication is clear: Maybe Epps lied about that, too.

 

Epps features prominently in conspiratorial accounts of the day’s events, the authors of which finger him as an undercover FBI agent responsible for instigating the attack. It defies logic to suggest that, if Epps was an FBI plant who instigated protesters into becoming rioters, he could have commanded the thousands who engaged in criminal misconduct.

 

It is profoundly unfortunate that it requires this much exposition to dispute spurious allegations that can be articulated in the space of a single sentence. Carlson’s narrative has had the intended effect on its audience — from former president Donald Trump on down to state-level Republican party chairs. But those who are “just asking questions” about January 6 don’t seem much interested in the answers they’re soliciting. That is an act of political malpractice.

 

Republicans can ignore, dispute, or dismiss the mountains of evidence surrounding the events of January 6 all they like, but they will continue to be confronted with those events and their complicity in them. It should come as no shock that voters did not like January 6 and do not want to see it repeated. Democrats wielded this intuitive insight to great effect in 2022, and they may do so again in 2024. If Republicans do not confront these events with clarity, honesty, and the resolve to ensure nothing like that ever happens again, they’ll find that voters will elect someone who will.