‘Sad to see Tucker go off the rails’: All the Republicans slamming Tucker Carlson for misleading insurrection broadcast

Republicans have been pressed on their reactions to Tucker Carlson’s inaccurate portrayal of the insurrection on January 6, 2021 as peaceful, with many criticising his mischaracterisation of the violent attack on the Capitol.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy handed over more than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from the attack, allowing the Fox News host to cherry-pick moments from the siege on Congress by Trump supporters to pretend that they were simply “orderly and meek” sightseers.

“I think it’s bulls***,” Republican North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis told reporters, according to Rolling Stone. “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’ centre and came in on an orderly basis.”

Kevin Cramer, a GOP Senator from North Dakota, said that “I think that breaking through glass windows and doors to get into the United States Capitol against the borders of police is a crime”.

“I think particularly when you come into the chambers, when you start opening the members’ desks, when you stand up in their balcony — to somehow put that in the same category as, you know, permitted peaceful protest is just a lie,” he told reporters.

“I think it doesn’t do any good for the narrative,” he added, according to NBC News.

John Thune of South Dakota, the Republican Senate minority whip, said “it was an attack on the Capitol,” while Chuck Grassley, GOP Senator from Iowa, told CNN “what happened that day shouldn’t have happened”.

“I was there on January 6. I saw what happened. I saw the aftermath. There was violence on January 6,” South Dakota GOP Senator Mike Rounds said. “I think the footage that’s available should be made available to all networks and everybody should be able to see for themselves just what kind of chaos we had on that day.”

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee and former Massachusetts governor, said that the American people saw what happened on January 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,” he added.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, told reporters that “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 at the Capitol thinks”.

The chief of the US Capitol Police, Tom Manger, wrote in an internal memo shared with CNN that “last night an opinion program aired commentary that was filled with offensive and misleading conclusions about the January 6 attack”.

“The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video. The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments,” he added.

“I want to associate myself entirely with the opinion of the chief of the Capitol Police about what happened on January 6,” Mr McConnell said, according to NBC News.

Mr Carlson said on Monday night that most of the rioters were peaceful and only a few behaved badly.

“The footage does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress,” he claimed. “Instead it shows police escorting people through the building.”

“Deadly insurrection — everything about that phrase is a lie,” Mr Carlson said on his programme. “Very little about January 6 was organized or violent. Surveillance video from inside the Capitol shows mostly peaceful chaos.”

Mr McConnell was asked if it was a mistake for Mr McCarthy to only hand the footage to Mr Carlson.

“My concern is how it was depicted,” he said.

“Clearly the chief of the Capitol police correctly described what most of us witnessed on January 6,” he added, but he chose to avoid criticising Mr McCarthy, according to NBC.

Mr Cramer added that the footage could have been given to “all sources equally,” instead of “one who is particularly good at conservative entertainment”.

Mr Romney added that it’s “really sad to see Tucker Carlson go off the rails like that,” adding that the host is “joining a range of shock jocks that are disappointing America and feeding falsehoods”.

“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,” he said. “And people saw that it was violent and destructive and should never happen again. But trying to normalize that behaviour is dangerous and disgusting.”

“We don’t want to whitewash January the 6th,” South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said.

“I think the January 6 committee had a partisan view of things, and I’d like to know more about what happened that day and the day before,” he added. “But I’m not interested in whitewashing the Covid lab theory, and I’m not interested in whitewashing January 6.”