Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is being blasted for his theory that the FBI had something to do with the deadly Capitol riot.
He first brought up the theory Tuesday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” telling his millions of viewers, “Strangely, some of the key people who participated on Jan. 6 have not been charged. Look at the document. The government calls those people ‘unindicted co-conspirators.’ What does that mean? Well, it means that in potentially every single case, they were FBI operatives.”
Wednesday night, after 24 hours of outcry, he brought it up again, dedicating another chunk of his show to the theory, which he sourced from right-wing website Revolver News, and decrying Twitter for slapping a warning label on his now-deleted tweet about it.
The Washington Post on Wednesday ran an analysis piece blasting “Tucker Carlson’s tinfoil-hat theory,” which Republican lawyer George Conway called “an insult to tinfoil hats.”
After Carlson doubled down on his claims for a second night, more coverage followed on Thursday. On CNN, senior legal analyst Elie Honig described how the theory is “legally impossible” and said Carlson is “dead wrong.”
“I often have reservations about playing the clearly deceitful propaganda spewed by certain entertainers but this morning we are because of the warnings we’re hearing that this is the beginning of a new effort to rewrite what happened Jan. 6, even though it is wrong,” said “New Day” anchor John Berman.
Honig explained, “The phrase ‘unindicted coconspirator’ is not something you can apply to someone working for the FBI because a conspiracy is a meeting of the minds. It’s an agreement between two people to commit a crime. However, if you’re an FBI undercover or you’re an informant, you’re not really part of a criminal agreement. You’re pretending for the sake of the investigation, so no prosecutor would ever this phrase, ‘unindicted coconspirator,’ to refer to somebody working for the FBI.”
It has been proved that the Jan. 6 insurrection was planned and attended by supporters of former president Donald Trump, who went to the Capitol after the single-term leader urged them to “stop the steal” of the 2020 election, which he lost.
Watch that breakdown below, via CNN: