Tucker Carlson joined Russell Brand’s podcast on Friday, and what was revealed has people talking.
Carlson told Brand about an interview he conducted before leaving Fox News with former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund. The interview with Sund, who held his position during the unrest that occurred on January 6th, never aired on the network due to Carlson’s firing.
Here’s part of the exchange.
CARLSON: You know it’s infected when it hurts. You recoil. They immediately recoiled when you asked any questions about January 6th. And that was the tip-off for me. I mean, I had no thought in my head as I watched this happen on television and in the subsequent weeks that US law enforcement or military agents had anything to do with it. That never crossed my mind. I never thought that there was a false flag or anything like that. I’m not a conspiracist by temperament. I never thought that.
And then I interviewed the chief of the Capitol Police, Steven Sund, in an interview that was never aired on Fox, by the way. I was fired before it could air. I’m gonna interview him again, but Steven Sund was the totally non-political, worked for Nancy Pelosi, I mean, this was not some right-wing activist. He was the chief of the Capitol Police on January 6th and he said, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that crowd was filled with federal agents.”
What? Yes, well, we would know, of course, because he was in charge of security at the site. So the more time has passed, now it’s been two-and-a-half years, it becomes really obvious that core claims they made about January 6th were lies, and my view about events and about people is if you catch someone telling a lie about one thing, the first question you have is what else are you lying about?
Sund will have to speak for himself eventually, but if Carlson is representing his words accurately, that’s quite the revelation. To have the person who was in charge of the Capitol Police on January 6th say that the crowd was full of federal agents is stunning.
What were all those federal agents doing there? Why didn’t they work harder to stop the unrest from escalating? How many were actually participating in the unrest or helped instigate it? These are huge questions that have never actually been answered with any real credibility. The Democrat-led January 6th Committee was a partisan joke that hid evidence to spin a political narrative, but clearly, a real security breakdown occurred. If the federal government, attempting some form of entrapment, pushed it to occur, there needs to be accountability.
As Carlson goes on to explain, that’s not an excuse for those that harmed police officers or broke the law. But the fact that people did bad things on January 6th does not mean the federal government’s role becomes irrelevant.
CARLSON: But the amount of lying around January 6th, and it was obvious in the tapes that I showed, is really distressing. And anyone that is covering for those lies should be ashamed of themself, and that would include almost the entire American media, including Fox News. People at Fox News, Fox News to its great credit let me air that, and I’m grateful that they did, but there were people that were there that were mad at me. Really? Why? If you think I’m cherry-picking it, taking it out of context, show me where.
By the way, I didn’t make the claim that it was entirely peaceful. It wasn’t. Police officers were injured. More police officers were injured at the riots in front of the White House the year before, but whatever. All injuries to police officers or anyone else are bad. I’m not making excuses for it.
Carlson goes on to describe how the “QAnon Shaman” was led into the Senate chamber by Capitol Police where he led a prayer and didn’t appear to be committing violent “insurrection” as was claimed.
CARLSON: But you can not call that guy an insurrectionist. That’s a lie. And by the way, an insurrection has a very specific meaning, and I’m pedantic about words because there’s the currency that I trade it. That’s what I do, I use words for a living so I care about their specific meanings. That was not an insurrection, it was not armed, and its purpose was not to overthrow the government.
It was a spasm of rage that Trump definitively helped inspire, that’s true, and, at the election results. I’m not actually for that. I don’t think leaders should be making people more pissed, in general.
Obviously, everything Carlson said in the above clip will spawn much controversy. That’s a good thing, in my opinion. It’s better that this stuff be talked about than swept under the rug, and it is never a bad thing to give people more information. If that information is inconvenient to someone’s chosen narrative, so be it.