Several Republican U.S. Senators blasted Fox News’s top-rated host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday after he showed select footage from the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and suggested the day’s events were not particularly violent and that lawmakers who suggested otherwise had “lied” to the American public.
Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made clear at a press conference Tuesday that he stood with the Capitol Police chief, who vehemently condemned Carlson. “So, that’s my reaction to it. It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that is completely at variance with what our Chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks,” McConnell said.
CNN’s Manu Raju spoke to various GOP Senate leaders who shot down Carlon’s attempts to downplay attacks on law enforcement that day. “To somehow put that in the same category as a permitted peaceful protest is just a lie,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told Raju.
Crame also weighed in on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) decision
“The best thing to do is to give it to every source at the same time and let everybody go through it and play it in its entirety. … and then avoid the political opinions versus just looking at the facts,” Cramer told reports.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) pulled no punches in declaring what he thought of Carlson’s Monday night broadcast.
“I think it’s bullshit,” Tillis told reporters.
“I was here. I was down there and I saw maybe a few tourists, a few people who got caught up in things. But when you see police barricades breached, when you see police officers assaulted, all of that … if you were just a tourist you should’ve probably lined up at the visitors’ center and came in on an orderly basis,” Tillis added.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) also responded, “I was here. It was not peaceful. It was an abomination. You’re entitled to believe what you want in America, but you can’t resort to violence to try to convince others of your point of view.”
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) also weighed in, saying, “I thought it was an insurrection at that time. I still think it was an insurrection today.”
Rounds replied directly to the words
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) declared, “The point is, what happened that day shouldn’t have happened.”
Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD) told reporters, “I think it was an attack on the Capitol. … There were a lot of people in the Capitol at the time that were scared for their lives.”
Utah Senator and former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R-UT) rebutted Carlson’s attempt to rewrite history. “The American people saw what happened on Jan. 6. They’ve seen the people that got injured, they saw the damage to the building. You can’t hide the truth by selectively picking a few minutes out of tapes and saying this is what went on. It’s so absurd. It’s nonsense.”
“It’s a very dangerous thing to do, to suggest that attacking the Capitol of the United States is in any way acceptable and it’s anything other than a serious crime, against democracy and against our country,” Romney added. “And people saw that it was violent and destructive and should never happen again. But trying to normalize that behavior is dangerous and disgusting.”