Giving Jan. 6 Tapes to Carlson, McCarthy Keeps a Promise to the Hard Right

WASHINGTON — Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to grant the Fox News host Tucker Carlson exclusive access to thousands of hours of security footage from inside the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack was his latest move to appease the right wing of his party, this time by effectively outsourcing a bid to reinvestigate the riot to its favorite cable news commentator, who has circulated conspiracy theories about the assault.

The most conservative Republican members of Congress — many of whom have worked to downplay or deny the reality of the Jan. 6 attack — have been pushing McCarthy for weeks to release the video after he promised to do so during his campaign for speaker.

McCarthy has shown little appetite for the kind of aggressive public re-litigation of what happened that day that some of his colleagues have called for, but he is sensitive to the dangers of angering his hard-core base by seeming to drop or disregard the matter.

That is where Carlson comes in.

“I promised,” McCarthy said Wednesday in a brief phone interview in which he defended his decision to grant Carlson exclusive access to the more than 40,000 hours of security footage. “I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment.”

Still, the sunshine McCarthy referred to will, for now, be filtered through a very specific prism — that of Carlson, a hero of the hard right who has insinuated without evidence that the Jan. 6 attack was a “false flag” operation carried out by the government.

After Carlson has had his way with the video, McCarthy said he planned to make the footage more widely available. His team has had internal conversations about providing the footage to other media outlets after Carlson has had his “exclusive” first airing, according to a source familiar with the deliberations who insisted on anonymity to speak about them.

For now, however, McCarthy has given a large head start to a purveyor of conspiracy theories about the attack.

Carlson declined Wednesday to comment on his review of the tapes.

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