Since news broke that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) gave Fox News’ Tucker Carlson exclusive access to surveillance footage of the January 6 insurrection, right-wing figures have been praising the move and pushing conspiracy theories about the attack in anticipation of his likely release of parts of the footage.

As Axios reported last week, McCarthy granted Carlson exclusive access to “​​41,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from the Jan. 6 riot.” McCarthy’s move aligns with his promise to far-right allies in his party to scrutinize the House January 6 committee’s work, which concluded its investigation earlier this year. Carlson, who has been a chief propagandist in the right’s effort to downplay and rewrite the January 6 insurrection, ominously teased on his show last week that his team had been “trying to figure out what it [the footage] means and how it contradicts or not the story we've been told for two years,” promising to bring his audience “what we find next week." 

Notably, McCarthy’s decision to give Carlson exclusive access came just days after it was revealed in a filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News that the network, including Carlson and his producers, knowingly lied to viewers in the aftermath of the 2020 election by spreading the same voter fraud lies that fueled the January 6 attack on the Capitol. (Carlson's access to and looming release of January 6 footage will likely represent the next phase of Fox's campaign to downplay and legitimize the insurrection and its aftermath.)

Mainstream media organizations are demanding broader access to the footage 

The Associated Press reported that “granting exclusive access to sensitive Jan. 6 security footage to such a deeply partisan figure is a highly unusual move.” In a letter to congressional leaders sent on behalf of ABC, Advance, Axios, CBS News, CNN, Gannett, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, ProPublica, and Scripps, an attorney argued that: 

 

According to analysis by The New York Times, McCarthy is “effectively outsourcing a bid to reinvestigate the riot to” the right wing of his party’s “favorite cable news commentator, who has circulated conspiracy theories about the assault.” This is part of a dangerous pattern that Media Matters has repeatedly documented in which Fox News serves as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, working to advance its partisan goals.

Right-wing figures praised the decision to give Carlson the tapes and spread baseless January 6 conspiracy theories 

• On his February 20 show, Infowars host Alex Jones declared that Carlson has, “for a national talk show host, done the best job of exposing January 6 was an inside job” and claimed to have inside knowledge that he “was doing a big in-depth investigation” about January 6 because “some of his [Carlson’s] crew … main producers, was here last week — I'll just leave it at that — with us at the office.” Jones claimed that: “I'm told in the coming weeks and months, you're going to see bombshell after bombshell after bombshell,” and baselessly claimed that the insurrection was orchestrated by “the feds,” saying that “soon Tucker Carlson will blow the thing wide open.”
• In a February 20 interview, right-wing conspiracy theorist Julie Kelly said that Carlson is the perfect person to provide with special access to all the footage of January 6, citing his revisionist film Patriot Purge and his ability to “get this out to his audience using maximum impact.” Kelly – who has called a January 6 officer a “crisis actor” – asserted that she’s “fully confident that he [Carlson] is going to come up with some explosive series of clips with context.” Right-wing host Clay Travis appeared alongside her and also celebrated Carlson getting the tapes: “Tucker and his staff are super competent and very skilled at narrative discussion, narrative shaping, and helping to understand the complexity of many different stories.”
• Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson lavished praise on Carlson in a February 20 stream while discussing the news that the footage was given to Carlson, saying that the host is “reaching his zenith” and is “actually doing something for this country. … [It’s] the most watched single show in the world and people are going to become awake.”
• On his February 23 show, Salem radio host Charlie Kirk said that he is “glad that Tucker is getting access” and volunteered his own staff to assist Carlson’s production team in going through the footage, saying, “I publicly volunteer, just from an educational standpoint, any of our staff that will fly out just to help sift through that and just be like, ‘Oh, that's interesting,’ just because you need eyeballs on it.”
• While appearing on Kirk’s show, Darren Beattie, who has appeared on Carlson’s show to spread false claims about January 6, suggested conspiracy theories Carlson’s team should look into, saying: “We really need to be narrow and targeted and specific with what we're looking at. … The two places to look at … any footage that exists that could help enlighten the situation regarding the pipe bomber. … But where you can really get some leverage out of this is examining the footage around the Peace Monument. That's the position right around the western perimeter of the Capitol where that initial and decisive Ray Epps breach occurred.” 
• On his February 21 show, far-right political commentator Sebastian Gorka praised “our buddy Tucker Carlson” for getting the tapes and spouted multiple conspiracy theories related to January 6, saying, “Maybe we will finally know why police officers were opening doors to the protesters, how those MAGA protesters actually died, who died that day, what really happened to Brian Sicknick on January the 6 before he died the following day,” adding that there might be “evidence of instigators, instigators who, well, let's just say, may not have been very MAGA, people like Ray Epps.” 
• Later in his show, Gorka hosted former Trump lawyer Joe diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing – both longtime misinformation spreaders in right-wing media – and Toensing suggested that “entrapment” could be a legal issue for the FBI regarding January 6. DiGenova predicted that “one of the things you'll see is you're not going to see any weapons on the part of demonstrators,” and “with 41,000 hours, there's going to be things that people have never even thought of. And all of a sudden there are going to be revelations about the conduct of the people who were allegedly providing security.” DiGenova also attacked the officer who shot Ashli Babbitt and declared that he “never should have been permitted to have a weapon.”
• In a February 21 segment on Newsmax, Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes predicted that “we're also going to be able to see, you know, through this videotape … remember, there were these people there that pretended to be MAGA, pretended to be for Trump, that were not for Trump. … My guess is you're going to see a lot more of these types of people that are going to be on those videotapes.”
• A February 21 Gateway Pundit article called McCarthy’s move to give Carlson the tapes “excellent” and suggested that Carlson could expose “doctored texts between Mark Meadows and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).” The article ended: “Get the popcorn ready for next week. Their lies will be exposed.”
• On his February 21 Daily Wire show, Ben Shapiro praised House Republicans for giving January 6 footage to Carlson, saying, “The left, of course, is going nuts because how dare you give it to Tucker Carlson. Well, why not? You guys give it to your favorite people in the media all the time.”
• Right-wing commentator Rogan O’Handley – who fired up a crowd on January 5, 2021, at a “Stop the Steal” rally – tweeted on February 20: “America is about to learn the raw truth of what really happened that day. It was a SETUP.” 
• Fox contributor Lisa Boothe tweeted on February 20: “This is smart. If you release all the footage immediately, people will move on too quickly. Tucker is brilliant, & so is his team. They will handle this correctly.”

Carlson’s long history of downplaying and pushing conspiracy theories about January 6

On his prime-time Fox program, Carlson has relentlessly spread an array of debunked conspiracy theories about the January 6 riot, given friendly interviews to insurrectionists, and created an alternate reality where federal agencies such as the FBI – not Trump supporters – were responsible for the attack. Carlson played a key role in elevating a version of that conspiracy theory into the public discourse and the halls of the U.S. Congress; it falsely posited that an Arizona man named Ray Epps was an FBI informant and had instigated the attack. Carlson has also baselessly suggested that the FBI could have planted the pipe bombs that were found at the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee on the eve of January 6.

 

Last year, Carlson released a Fox Nation special series called Patriot Purge, which advanced the unhinged conspiracy theory that the government had staged the attack in order to justify persecuting conservatives, including “sticking them in the gulag” and “in Guantanamo Bay for American citizens.” And while other cable networks aired live coverage of the first prime-time January 6 House select committee hearing that gave new insight into former President Donald Trump’s coup attempt, Carlson counterprogrammed on his show by recapping a litany of conspiracy theories about the attack and downplaying the violence.

Just last month, Carlson marked the two-year anniversary of January 6 by calling it a “wholly created myth.”