Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) listens as Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) speaks at a press conference on the Senate’s upcoming procedural vote to codify Roe v. Wade on the U.S. Capitol Constructing on May 05, 2022 in Washington, DC.
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday strongly condemned Fox News host Tucker Carlson for airing footage Monday of the deadly Jan. 6 rebellion in a way that portrayed it as a peaceful visit to the U.S. Capitol.
In blistering terms, Schumer, D-N.Y., also criticized House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., for giving Carlson and Fox News exclusive access to 44,000 hours of Capitol security footage. Carlson then used selective clips to construct that false narrative for his broadcast Monday evening, Schumer said.
“I and so many others who were here” on Jan. 6, 2021, “are only furious with Tucker Carson and Kevin McCarthy today,” Schumer said on the Senate floor.
“Last night hundreds of thousands of Americans tuned into some of the shameful hours we’ve ever seen on cable television,” Schumer said.
“With disregard of the risks and knowing full well he was lying, lying to his audience, Fox News host Tucker Carlson ran a lengthy segment last night, arguing the Jan. 6 Capitol attack was not a violent rebellion,” Schumer said.
And he said Carlson, after “diving deep into the waters of conspiracy and cherry-picking” security footage “told the bold-faced lie that the Capitol attack which all of us saw with our own eyes, was by some means not an attack in any respect” by lots of of supporters of then-President Donald Trump.
Tucker Carlson speaks during 2022 FOX Nation Patriot Awards at Hard Rock Live at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood on November 17, 2022 in Hollywood, Florida.
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Carlson “tried to argue it was nothing greater than a peaceful sightseeing tour,” Schumer said. “Are you able to imagine?”
“To say Jan. 6 was not violent is a lie, a lie pure and easy,” he added. “I do not think I’ve ever seen a prime-time cable news anchor manipulate his viewers the best way Mr. Carlson did last night. I do not think I’ve ever seen an anchor treat the American people and American democracy with such disdain.”
The Senate leader also addressed Carlson’s superiors directly from the ground, amongst them Fox News boss Rupert Murdoch, urging them to order Carlson to not run a second segment based on the safety footage that Fox plans to air Tuesday night.
Carlson during his broadcast Monday said, “The footage doesn’t show an rebellion or a riot in progress.”
“As a substitute it shows police escorting people through the constructing, including the now-infamous ‘QAnon Shaman,” Carlson said.
He didn’t show graphic footage captured by security cameras throughout the constructing of rioters attacking police guarding the Capitol, invading the Senate chamber and congressional offices, including the office of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and lots of other scenes of mayhem.
The Department of Justice, in a press release Monday, noted that no less than 1,000 people have been charged with crimes related to the attack, during which 140 law enforcement officials were assaulted.
Schumer said McCarthy is “every bit as” culpable as Carlson for the published.
“Speaker McCarthy’s decision to share security footage with Fox looked like a mistake from the very starting, but after last night, it looks like a disaster,” Schumer said. “Speaker McCarthy has played a treacherous, a treacherous game by catering to the hard right.”
Carlson in January had said that McCarthy, who on the time was battling to win support for his election as speaker from far-right Republicans, could improve his probabilities by releasing “all of” the Jan. 6 security footage, not only the fabric previously disclosed by a select House committee.
When McCarthy followed through on that after becoming speaker, he allowed Fox News, and only Fox News, access to the footage.
He later defended that call by saying he was giving Fox News an “exclusive,” comparing it to exclusives obtained by other networks.
“So we’ve exclusive, then I’ll give it out to your entire country,” McCarthy said in late February.
Schumer said that McCarthy, in giving Fox News the footage, has “enabled the large lie and has further eroded away and our precious democracy.
“When people don’t think elections across the level that is the start of the tip of this daring experiment in democracy that has gone on for greater than 200 years,” Schumer said.
Schumer didn’t add that the attack on the Capitol got here after weeks of false claims by Trump that he, and never President Joe Biden, had actually won the 2020 election.
Trump on Jan. 6 had urged a crowd of supporters outside the White House to march to the Capitol and fight against a joint session of Congress that was meeting that day to substantiate Biden’s election.
Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, after Schumer’s remarks told reporters that Carlson’s claims concerning the attack are “bull—-“
“I used to be here,” Tillis said, in line with NBC News. “I used to be down there and I saw possibly a number of tourists, a number of individuals who got caught up in things.”
“But once you see police barricades breached, once you see law enforcement officials assaulted, all of that … in the event you were only a tourist you must’ve probably lined up on the visitors’ center and got here in on an orderly basis,” he said.