Jan. 6 Panel Admits Members Never Saw Footage Aired By Tucker Carlson
The January 6 committee has effectively admitted that, prior to certifying Joseph Biden as the next president, it did not give the American people a fair and accurate assessment of the Capitol riot that took place in 2021.
Committee chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) claimed in a statement to CNN that the group never examined the J6 footage, which Fox News broadcast last week and had not been seen before.
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“I’m not actually aware of any member of the committee who had access,” Thompson said. “We had a team of employees who kind of went through the video.”
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The January 6 probe was allegedly charged by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) with providing an objective and accurate account of the incident, regardless of whether the panel members’ staff just looked through the video or were previously aware of it but chose to keep it secret.
Over 41,000 hours of previously unreleased video footage shot in and around the U.S. Capitol on the day of the disturbance were made available to Carlson’s team; he broadcast some of it on Monday. Earlier this week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy defended his choice to grant Carlson’s team access.
“Do you regret giving him this footage so he could whitewash the events of that day?” one reporter asked the California Republican.
McCarthy responded by citing “transparency” as a major reason why he gave Fox News first access.
“I said at the very beginning – transparency. And so what I want to produce for everybody is exactly what I said, that people can actually look at it and see what’s gone on that day,” McCarthy noted.
“Each person can come up with their own conclusion [about the footage], but what I just want to make sure is I had transparency,” he added.
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McCarthy specifically criticized CNN for its coverage, claiming that it had in the past caused senators like himself to have serious security concerns. He emphasized that he wants to make sure there is transparency going forward.
Carlson said during his Monday show that Americans had been “lied” to about at least some of the events of Jan. 6, and he called out specific members of the January 6 Committee in particular.
“If there’s one takeaway from the corpus of footage that we spent three weeks looking at, it’s that the January 6th committee lied,” he said. “Its members are liars, and as the result of those lies, core civil liberties in this country were eroded, and people went to prison. They’re in prison as of right now, unjustly. So those lies had consequences.
“So you have to ask yourself, whatever happened to the members of the January 6th committee, these liars who hurt people and the country?” he added. “Well, let’s see, Adam Schiff is running for Senate. Adam Kinzinger got a job at CNN. Liz Cheney somehow wound up a professor at the University of Virginia, the August University of Virginia. They’re all still there. Benny Thompson. Ooh, listen to his wisdom. But they’re liars, and above all,” he added.
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McCarthy kept his commitment to making the security footage from the event in the US Capitol on January 6 public last month. Mike Allen, a co-founder of Axios, stated: “This week, Carlson TV producers were on Capitol Hill to start sifting through the collection, which includes numerous camera views from all over the Capitol grounds. The next few weeks will see the first airing of excerpts.
Republican representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Lauren Boebert of Colorado declared earlier in February that McCarthy had consented to make more of the footage available to the public.
Gates claimed that McCarthy made the pact in order to obtain his and Boebert’s support, two Republicans among the roughly 20 who withheld their backing for several days, depriving him of the speaker’s gavel.
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“The American people deserve to know the truth about what happened on January 6th. We have demanded to see all the footage. Transparency is coming,” Gaetz said. “Every time from the JFK files to 9/11, to now January 6th. It’s our own government, our own Department of Justice that seems to stand in the way of transparency.”