CNN anchor Anderson Cooper sat with former Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone on Tuesday to react to Tucker Carlson’s unveiling of selectively edited security footage from the Jan. 6 insurrection on the Capitol, as acquired by House speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Taking it all in, Cooper mocked the Fox News host, saying that he can’t imagine Carlson not “wetting his pants” alongside the Jan. 6 rioters.
“The idea of Tucker Carlson being in that mob that day and not wetting his pants is hard to imagine,” Cooper said. “I find it hard to understand somebody who has never put himself in harm’s way in any capacity for anyone else or on reporting a story, and yet has the audacity to try to try to rewrite history. I mean, that’s what this is: an attempt to rewrite history on what is one of the most consequential, certainly one of the biggest, events in American democracy and biggest threats to American democracy.”
Fanone, who almost lost his life defending the Capitol and now has PTSD from the events, agreed.
“Tucker Carlson is by his own admission an entertainer, not a journalist,” he said. “And on top of that, he’s proven himself to be Donald Trump’s chief propagandist. And that’s all this was, and I think that most Americans recognize that way before this segment aired that this was propaganda and it was an attempt by Tucker Carlson to downplay and whitewash the events of January 6.”
Carlson, on the other hand, doubled down, claiming that his narrative of Jan. 6 is proven by the footage. Within the security footage aired Monday and Tuesday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” were clips of Sen. Josh Hawley fleeing from rioters.
“The surveillance footage shows that famous clip was a sham, edited deceptively by the January 6 Committee. The clip was propaganda, not evidence,” Carlson insisted. “The actual videotape shows that Hawley was one of many lawmakers being ushered out of the building by Capitol Hill police officers. And, in fact, Hawley was at the back of the pack. The ‘coward’ tape was a lie — one of many from the January 6 Committee.”
According to Carlson, the footage is “a lie” because other members of Congress fled to a safe location, as well. However, other senators have spoken out against Carlson’s whitewashing.
For example, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who claims Carlson wanted him to appear on his show, wrote on Twitter that he would only join him after Carlson “admits to his viewers live on air that he has been lying to them about the 2020 elections and about what happened on January 6.”
