Eight minutes into the Tucker Carlson “expose” on the video Republican House Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy aired Monday, and Fox’s playbook for the video is clear:  “We going to show you the video in pieces tonight,” Carlson said downplaying the violence of the day by predictably highlighting snippets of mundane and boring shots of people to claim it was just a “hundreds, maybe a thousand” bad seeds with hundreds more “tourists” who respected the Capitol.

Carlson and Miranda Devine, a New York Post columnist, used the QAnon Shaman as an example:  they were (mostly) peaceful who didn’t break windows–even though they can into the building through broken windows–and they came through.  Carlson and Devine note most protestors came through “open doors”–doors that were opened by the first people to crawl through the broken windows.

“Clearly the Capitol Police, you have nine or ten officers there, do not think there’s anything unusual about this guy with fur hat and the Viking horns and the face paint wondering around the corridors and walking into the then Senate chamber had been evacuated,” the Australian columnist for the Ausralian Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper contends, without noting Jacob Chansley/JakeAngeli/QAnon Shaman was charged and pled guilty to a charge of obstructing an official government proceeding, not anything to do with destruction of property or assaulting police officers.  The officers, incidentally, were following Chansley, who was alone out of sensitive areas.

While Devine goes on to say the police response was reasonable–they were outnumbered, and early on, they were trying to keep people “calm and reasonable,” she notes–she goes on to blame Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell “who refused the numerous requests from Capitol Police Chief Stephen Sund on the days before and several times on January 6th” for additional security.  (There is no record of Sund making such a request to Pelosi or McConnell.  He did make a request for National Guard troops to be at the ready to the Sergeants-at-Arms for both chambers, who turned his request.  Both Sergeants-at-Arms were fired after the insurrection, but Carlson says the “lies” Pelosi told about Capitol security merited her removal from office and barring her from ever serving again.  Carlson said this less than two weeks after court documents showed he repeatedly lied to his audience about the 2020 presidential election outcome.)

Carlson claims the police were “accessories” to the crimes because they did not arrest Chansley or any of the protesters on January 6th.  “This seems insane to me,” and Carlson said he didn’t understand why police officers haven’t been charged for their “cooperation” with the insurrectionists.