Fox News host Tucker Carlson has aired surveillance footage related to the January 6, 2021 US Capitol breach, including clips showing Jacob Chansley, known as the “QAnon Shaman”, apparently being “escorted” through the building.
Carlson told his viewers that the footage shows “mostly peaceful chaos” inside the Capitol at the time.
In the clips, the “shaman" - a bare-chested, Viking horn-wearing man with a painted face – is seen being escorted by riot police as he wanders the corridors of the Capitol. The police clearly make no move to stop him, according to the footage.
In the video, the police are seen escorting Chansley to various entrances of the chamber, which appear to be locked, eventually finding him an open door through which he vanishes.
“Virtually every moment of his time inside the Capitol was caught on tape. The tapes show the Capitol police never stopped Jacob Chansley. They helped him. They acted as his tour guides,” Carlson said.
A 33-year-old naval veteran from Arizona, “the QAnon Shaman” was among the crowd that breached the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a bid to prevent Congress from certifying the election victory of Democrat Joe Biden. Chansley, who goes by the name Jake Angeli, denied accusations of being a racist or white supremacist and claimed that he never hurt or threatened anybody that day.
Earlier this year, Chansley said that the 41-month prison sentence he received for obstruction of an official proceeding is not fair and that the US court was trying to make an example of him by giving him a long term of incarceration. He denied accusations of being a racist or white supremacist and claimed that he never hurt or threatened anybody during the Capitol breach.
As for other clips released by Carlson, they in particular showed police officer Brian Sicknick, who died one day after the January 6 insurrection.
One video shows Sicknick in the crypt of the Capitol, appearing to give instructions to some of the nearby rioters who are milling around the area, repeatedly waving his arm.
“To this day, media accounts describe Sicknick as someone who was, quote, 'slain' on January 6. The video we reviewed proves that is a lie,” Carlson said. He argued that the officer was “healthy and vigorous,” noting that he was wearing a helmet.
“So it's hard to imagine he was killed by a head injury. Whatever happened to Brian Sicknick was very obviously not the result of violence he suffered at the entrance to the Capitol. […] This tape overturns the single most powerful and politically useful lie the Democrats have told us about January 6,” something that is described by them as a violent insurrection, the Fox News host pointed out.
US Capitol Breach
On January 6, 2021, a crowd, including Trump supporters, breached the US Capitol building following a rally held by the 45th US president outside the White House at which the ex-POTUS alleged that Democrat Joe Biden had won the November 2020 election fraudulently.
During the breach, the protesters tried to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory. Five people, including a Capitol police officer, died in the wake of the events.
Trump was accused of "incitement of insurrection" despite finally having called on his supporters, via his Twitter account, "to stay peaceful" and "go home", and recording a video address on January 7 to condemn the violence. He was impeached for an unprecedented second time over the accusations, but was later acquitted in the Senate.
In December 2022, the House January 6 Committee released its long-awaited final report, capping its 18-month probe into the Capitol breach. The 845-page document, in particular, called for creating a “formal mechanism for evaluating whether to bar” Trump from holding future federal office due to evidence that he violated his constitutional oath to support the US Constitution while engaging in an "insurrection."
Trump in a series of social media posts called the select panel's report “highly partisan” and repeated the claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him.