By Sandy Fitzgerald. Media: Newsmax.
New footage released through House Speaker Kevin McCarthy from the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the U.S. Capitol shows two Capitol Police officers escorting “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley past other police officers and to the door of the U.S. Senate.
The footage, aired by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Monday night, shows the officers closely following Chansley through the halls of the Capitol as he walked around in his Viking-horned hat and face paint, reports the New York Post.
“The tapes show the Capitol police never stopped Jacob Chansley. They helped him. They acted as his tour guides,” Carlson said. “Virtually every moment of his time inside the Capitol was caught on tape.”
Carlson has been given access to 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from Jan. 6, and in the segments he showed Monday, the officers and Chansley walked past seven other police officers as he went to several entrances of the Chamber that appeared to be locked. After a while, they helped him open a door and he entered the Senate chamber, the footage appeared to show.
He also played a jailhouse interview with Chansley, 33, who is in prison under charges of obstructing an official proceeding.
“The one very serious regret that I have [is] believing that when we were waved in by police officers that it was acceptable,” Chansley says.
The Capitol Police said in a statement that one of the officers walking with Chansley was trying to “de-escalate” the situation, but the police did not explain how Chansley was able to walk past the other officers without being stopped.
Carlson said that Chansley became the “face of Jan. 6” as a “dangerous conspiracy theorist dressed in an outlandish costume who led the violent insurrection to overthrow America’s democracy.”
The Fox News reporter says he will also air footage that he says disproves proves the claim that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by rioters.
“Taken as a whole, the video record does not support the claim that January 6 was an insurrection,” he said.
Meanwhile, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told MSNBC that Carlson is posing a “serious security risk” by reporting on the tapes and said they weren’t previously released because they lay out “evacuation routes, it lays out where the vice president went, it lays out where the senior members of Congress were evacuated, and so on.”
Carlson’s team, though, noted that the select committee investigating Jan. 6 has already aired the footage of the evacuation routes taken by then-Vice President Mike Pence and Rep. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.
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