Now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is giving them 44,000 hours of surveillance tapes so they can piece together a fantasy exoneration — and provide blueprints for a more dangerous insurrection next time.
Just four days after a court filing revealed Fox stars repeatedly calling the “stolen election” stories they promoted “crazy,” word leaked that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was handing Fox’s most prominent propagandist, Vladimir Putin apologist and conspiracy theorist — Tucker Carlson — about 44,000 hours of Capitol surveillance tapes from the Jan. 6 insurrection, a move immediately blasted as a Capitol security and national security threat.
“It’s hard to overstate the potential security risks if this material were to be used irresponsibly,” Jan. 6 Select Committee Chair Bennie Thompson said, when word leaked on Feb 20. Viewing all the tapes would provide comprehensive behind-the-scenes intelligence regarding security camera locations, security protocols, evacuation routes — everything that insurrectionists planning a future assault could possibly want to know.
“We were very careful to put together a very comprehensive video portrait of what happened that day,” said Jaime Raskin, who served with Thompson on the Jan. 6 Committee. “But we didn’t give away the location of cameras, we didn’t give away evacuation routes, escape pathways for the members of Congress.”
“These [tapes] are security footage,” said Donald Trump impeachment manager Madeleine Dean. “It is revealing of where the Capitol police are and different staging, what was going on. It would give access to bad actors to try to do it again. So it’s extraordinarily irresponsible.”
McCarthy, who promised to release the tapes as part of his campaign for House Speaker, tried to spin the release as an act of transparency, saying the tapes “belong to the American public.” But he didn’t give the tapes to the American people. He gave them to Tucker Carlson — a man who created a three-part conspiracy-riddled pseudo-documentary,Patriot Purge, in 2021 arguing that Jan. 6 was a false flag operation, “being used as a pretext to strip millions of Americans —disfavored Americans — of their core constitutional rights, and to defame them as domestic terrorists.”
“Can you imagine if the Jan. 6 Select Committee had done this? Given materials to one network, much less one host,” said Raskin. “There would have rightfully been a scandal about it. And so when Kevin McCarthy says he wants to give it to the American people, but it’s going to be filtered through the prism of Tucker Carlson, I think it shows how distorted and deranged his politics have become.”
In Patriot Purge, Carlson argued that, “The very same corrupt interests in Washington that pushed the Iraq War under false pretenses are now pushing the lie of a domestic white terror,” as if he himself hadn’t pushed the Iraq War under false pretenses.
“We know today for certain that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, they have chemical and biological weapons. And the question remains what do we do about it? Neither you nor any Democrat I know has the answer to that question. … There’s a lunatic with weapons that could kill the civilized world,” Carlson said to Paul Begalia on CNN’s Crossfire on Feb 5, 2003. None of that was true.
But Carlson himself has been a promoter of domestic white terror. And it’s no lie: The most recent annual report on murder and extremism in the U.S. from the Anti-Defamation League, released on Feb. 22, reported that “domestic extremists killed at least 25 people” and “All the extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds,” with 21 linked to white supremacists.
As for Carlson’s role, he’s been the most influential promoter of the racist Great Replacement Theory, the same theory advanced in a chain of white supremacist mass murder manifestos across the globe, most recently by the shooter who killed 10 people in Buffalo last May. Carlson has mentioned the Great Replacement Theory more than 400 times on his primetime show.
Two long-time paid contributors, Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes, quit Fox in protest of Patriot Purge, calling it a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, which is “riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery and damning omissions,” and warning of Carlson’s danger. “If a person with such a platform shares such misinformation loud enough and long enough, there are Americans who will believe — and act upon — it,” they wrote. “This isn’t theoretical. This is what actually happened on January 6, 2021.”
Now McCarthy has handed him the most sensitive inside information about the Jan. 6 attack, so that he can manufacture an even slicker false narrative than the one he did in 2021.
On Feb. 24, two groups of news organizations wrote to McCarthy, requesting he actually provides the transparent access he touted.
Fox’s Election Lies Revealed
“Sydney Powell is lying.” That quote from Carlson on Nov. 16, 2020 is the very first line in Dominion Voting System’s motion for summary judgment in its $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox. Powell was then the leading lawyer pushing baseless voter fraud claims, and Carlson had written privately three days earlier “that Trump needed to concede and agreed that ‘there wasn’t enough fraud to change the outcome’ of the election,” the motion went on to say.
Yet, on Jan. 26 — six days after Joe Biden’s inauguration — the motion states, “Carlson invited his leading sponsor Mike Lindell on his show, where Lindell spouted these same conspiracies on air.”
Carlson was very clear about who he was promoting. Throughout November he called Powell, a “crazy person,” “lunatic,” “nutcase,” “unguided missile” and “dangerous as hell.”
How crazy was she? In an email to another Fox host, Powell revealed that her source “gets her information from experiencing something ‘like time-travel in a semi-conscious state,’ allowing her to ‘see what others don’t see, and hear what others don’t hear,'” Dominion’s motion summarized.
As for Lindell, the day Carlson hosted him his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, warned, “Mike Lindell is crazy and about to get sued by Dominion.”
The motivation was fear of losing its audience base to more extremist alternatives, after Fox’s decision desk was the first to call Arizona for Biden on Nov. 4 and then followed other networks in declaring that Biden had won on Nov. 7, once the Pennsylvania outcome was clear. “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” Carlson texted that day. “We’re playing with fire, for real … an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.”
Five days later, on Nov. 12, Carlson went so far as calling for Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich to be fired for fact-checking a Trump tweet referencing Fox broadcasts and saying there was no evidence of voter fraud from Dominion. “Please get her fired. Seriously … What the fuck? I’m actually shocked,” Carlson texted host Sean Hannity. “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
Carlson wasn’t alone. On Nov. 9, “Fox executives made an explicit decision to push narratives to entice their audience back,” Dominion’s motion states. “[Fox News CEO Suzanne] Scott and [Fox Corp. CEO] Lachlan Murdoch exchanged texts about the plan going forward: Scott: ‘Viewers going through the 5 stages of grief. It’s a question of trust—the AZ [call] was damaging but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.’ Murdoch: ‘Yes. But needs constant rebuilding without any missteps.’ Scott: ‘Yes today is day one and it’s a process.’
“If responsible journalism by a handful of Fox people resulted in a company crisis, that means the company is not a news company — because giving truthful news actually was a big problem,” said NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen on MSNBC.
Rather than a news company, “I see Fox as the commercial wing of the MAGA movement that has overtaken the Republican party. And what it makes is resentment news — who to resent, what’s new and different to resent,” Rosen said. “That kind of product, resentment news, can also become a source of power,” he added. “Both the Republican party and Fox News have had to learn that this power of resentment can be turned against them.”
With that kind of motivation still driving them, neither Carlson, nor anyone else at Fox is about to produce a report on Jan. 6 that casts the insurrectionists in a bad light. They just can’t afford to tell their audience the truth.