Schumer calls Tucker Carlson’s release of Jan 6 footage ‘shameful’
Tucker Carlson continued to double-down on his defence of the Capitol rioters in the latest instalment of his Fox News show on Thursday, interviewing the mother and attorney of “Q Shaman” Jacob Chansley to argue he had been wrongly jailed over his part in the attack.
He also lashed out at transgender people by accusing them of taking over International Women’s Day, called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky a “despot” over his request for US F-16 fighter jets and allowed former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard to push a Russian propaganda line blaming Nato for the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline during an interview.
Mr Carlson has been branded “shameful” by the White House after airing selectively-edited footage of the 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol on Monday night – chosen from 41,000 hours of security film handed to his programme by House speaker Kevin McCarthy – in order to argue that the insurrection was “peaceful” and that its participants were only “sightseers”.
The feature provoked an uproar on both sides of the aisle, with the Capitol police chief and both the Senate majority and minority leaders, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, coming together to condemn Mr Carlson’s spin on the insurrection, in which five people died and over which more than 1,000 people have now been charged.
The controversy has coincided with the publication of the latest filings from Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against Fox, which revealed, among many other things, that Mr Carlson told a colleague that he “passionately” hated Donald Trump in a bombshell text message.
“We are very very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” he wrote. “I hate him passionately.”
