Is it surprising that Rachel Maddow is mad at House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for turning over 41,000 hours of Capitol Police surveillance footage from January 6, 2021 to FOX News host Tucker Carlson?
“This just allows Carlson to concoct alternative narratives,” the MSNBC personality hissed.
Maddow is not alone in her outrage. She is joined by Select Committee to Investigate January 6th members Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Benny Thompson (D-Ms.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) among others. Some fellow Twitterati are even comparing giving the footage to Carlson with handing over state secrets to Moscow.
“A man who spews Kremlin talking points. Suggests January 6th was a false flag. And spreads the Big Lie,” spluttered Schiff in a tweet late Monday, adding “Make no mistake: this isn’t about transparency, it’s about fueling dangerous conspiracy theories.”
Coming from Schiff, that last dig is particularly rich. Most of what the congressman from Hollywood said about Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election has since been disproven, but that hasn’t caused Schiff, now running for Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat in the U.S. Senate, any reflective pause.
Among the reasons why critics of McCarthy’s handing the tapes over to Carlson claim sharing them is so dangerous is because it might require the Capitol Police to change the location of security cameras. Think that through for a moment.
Maddow, Schiff, Thompson, Raskin and others aren’t mad that the footage went to a competing news network (ABC news was given exclusive access to the committee’s hearings themselves, indeed it helped produce them), logical though that would be from one standpoint. No, they consider FOX News to be the enemy. It is the enemy of democracy and the enemy of America, they claim.
Indeed, a 2019 piece in Wired by Garrett Graff asserts “Fox News is a threat to national security.”
There are just as many Americans outraged that Carlson should have access to the trove of CCTV footage as there are ones curious to see what FOX will make of the tapes. After all, why should information about the events of January 6 only be released to piecemeal and to fellow partisans? Further, there are very legitimate questions about discrepancies in the official Jan. 6 narrative, some of which have been highlighted by the conservative Revolver News.
The good news is that if Tucker Carlson does in fact doctor the tapes or selectively edit them, there is always Angus King to drop a dime – if not to Twitter, then maybe back to Maddow, Schiff, Thomson and Raskin.
