Photo: Alamy
After two years of waiting, the Jan. 6 security surveillance footage was handed over to Fox News host Tucker Carlson at the behest of Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.
On Monday and Tuesday night, Carlson aired portions of the more than 40,000 hours of video footage to American viewers, tearing apart a narrative promulgated by the Jan. 6 Committee that the protesters from that day participated in an “insurrection.”
“The footage does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress,” Carlson said. “Instead, it shows police escorting protesters through the building, including the now-infamous QAnon Shaman.”
As seen below, video evidence shows a Capitol police officer escorting the “Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, through the building:
The Guardian previously reported that Chansley had been sentenced to 41 months in prison for “storming the Capitol” on Jan. 6. However, the surveillance video does not seem to back up claims of violent, insurrectionist behavior.
Carlson pointed out that the same bite-sized pieces of footage have been shown on an endless loop across mainstream media platforms for two years.
“There’s a reason for that,” he commented. “But it turns out, there’s quite a bit of video you haven’t seen and that video tells a very different story about what happened on January 6…. taken as a whole, the video record does not support the claim that January 6 was an insurrection. In fact, it demolishes that claim, and that’s exactly why the Democratic Party and its allies in the media prevented you from seeing it.”
He added, “By controlling the images you were allowed to view from January 6, they controlled how the public understood that day. They could lie about what happened, and you would never know the difference. Those lies had a purpose: they created a pretext for federal crackdown for opponents of the Uniparty in Washington.”
President Donald Trump addressed the long-awaited release of the footage, making a powerful statement on Truth Social:
“LET THE JANUARY 6 PRISONERS GO. THEY WERE CONVICTED, OR ARE AWAITING TRIAL, BASED ON A GIANT LIE, A RADICAL LEFT CON JOB. THANK YOU TO TUCKER CARLSON AND SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE KEVIN McCARTHY FOR WHAT YOU BOTH HAVE DONE. NEW VIDEO FOOTAGE IS IRREFUTABLE!!!”