OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Tucker Carlson’s primetime show on Fox News has smashed another key barrier. A new Mediaite report notes that Carlson dominated the cable news ratings on Wednesday night — and it was not even close.
In the 8 p.m. ET time slot, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” brought in a whopping 3.17 million total viewers. Fox News prime time soared to over 3 million average viewers on Wednesday night. For comparison, MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes” brought in 1.34 million total viewers and CNN’s Anderson Cooper had 665,000.
The massive ratings for Carlson came as he has been airing new footage in recent days on his Fox News program from the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The chief of the U.S. Capitol Police issued a memo to his staff on Tuesday following the airing of previously unseen security footage by Carlson, which showed police officers appearing to stand passively as a large crowd entered the Capitol that day.
Police Chief Tom Manger condemned the comments made during the airing of the footage on Carlson’s Monday night program, stating that it was “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions” about the riot of January 6, 2021, when a group of people breached the U.S. Capitol building, causing disruptions to lawmakers who were in the process of certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
“The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video,” Manger claimed. “The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments.”
Carlson was provided access to some 40,000 hours of previously unseen surveillance video by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
McCarthy, for his part, is not bothered by criticism from Democrats and the mainstream media after he released the unseen footage to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has aired a lot of the footage on his program.
McCarthy has released the tapes in the media and is promising to give the public access to them after his team reviews all of the footage to address any potential security concerns, the Washington Times reported.
“This is the challenge. The Democrats told us it was only 14,000 hours of tapes, lo and behold, we take the majority and it’s 42,000 hours, so that would take me years to go all the way through,” McCarthy told reporters. “Yeah, I think the public should see what’s happened on them.”
“We’ve worked with the Capitol Police [to] tell us about [any] section that there was a problem. And that takes a long time. But we want to make sure everybody has the opportunity to come and see what they want,” he said. “So we’ve created the process to make that start happening.”
House Republicans are also launching their own version of a Jan. 6 committee that will “reinvestigate” what happened at the U.S. Capitol in 2021.
Georgia Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk will chair the new panel and says they will “investigate both sides” and “show what really happened on Jan. 6.”
Loudermilk also declared that the panel would consider seeking an interview with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, including any decisions made about Capitol security ahead of Jan. 6, CBS News reported.
House Republicans issued a scathing report exposing Pelosi for her role in security and intelligence failures at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Emails and text messages from Pelosi’s office reveal her staff held regular meetings discussing security detail, helped edit authorities’ plans, and turned down several requests from federal law enforcement needed to protect the Capitol on that day.
“Days after Pelosi’s Jan. 6 select committee recommended insurrection charges against former president Donald Trump over the Capitol riot, Republicans have hit back with a counter-investigation apportioning blame for the internal security breakdown on Jan. 6 to Pelosi and a dysfunctional Capitol Police intelligence division,” New York Post reported.
The New York Post reported:
“Leadership and law enforcement failures within the U.S. Capitol left the complex vulnerable on January 6, 2021,” says the report, which is based on a trove of texts and email messages, and testimony from Capitol Police leaders and rank-and-file officers.
House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving, who answered to Pelosi as one of three voting members of the Capitol Police Board, “succumbed to political pressures from the Office of Speaker Pelosi and House Democrat leadership,” was “compromised by politics and did not adequately prepare for violence at the Capitol.”
Pelosi and her staff “coordinated closely” with Irving on security plans for the Joint Session of Congress on Jan. 6, but Republicans were deliberately left out of “important discussions related to security.”
And, in an apparent attempt to hide from Republicans the fact that they were being excluded from discussions, Irving asked a senior Democratic staffer to “act surprised” when he sent “key information about plans for the Joint Session on Jan. 6, 2021, to him and his Republican counterpart.”
The report also claims that “staff within the House Sergeant at Arms office emailed Paul Irving that January 6th was Pelosi’s fault,” although it provides no evidence for the assertion.
The report said that the Speaker’s office “helped edit authorities’ plans, and turned down several requests from federal law enforcement needed to protect the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“I have no power over the Capitol Police. Does anybody not know that? The Capitol Police have responded to that gentleman’s allegation, and that stands as what it is. But I have no power over the police,” Pelosi’s office said in February.
