U.S. Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday denounced Fox Corporation’s Tucker Carlson‘s Monday night misinformation and disinformation segments which falsely framed the January 6, 2021 insurrection as a largely peaceful event and painted insurrectionists and rioters as “sightseers.”
“With regard to the presentation on Fox News last night,” McConnell told reporters, “I want to associate myself entirely with the opinion of the Chief of the Capitol Police about what happened on January 6th.”
McConnell held up a statement from the Capitol Police Chief (full text below) that is a strong indictment of Fox’s Tucker Carlson show, saying it provided “offensive and misleading conclusions.”
“The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video,” Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger also says. “The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments.”
“My concern is how it was depicted,” Sen. McConnell also told reporters when asked if it was a mistake for Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy to have handed over 40,000 hours of January 6 video to Carlson’s team. “Clearly, the chief of the Capitol Police, in my view, correctly describes what most of us witnessed firsthand on January 6.”
“It was a mistake in my view for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at Capitol thinks.”
McConnell refused to deviate from his remarks when asked to comment on Speaker McCarthy’s release of the video to Carlson, and when asked why many Republicans refuse to accept that January 6 was an attack or an insurrection.
See the Capitol Police Chief’s statement and watch McConnell’s remarks below or at this link.