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Tucker Carlson did a pretty credible original documentary about the January 6 kerfuffle, pointing out all the facts being ignored by the Democrats who wanted an insurrection narrative. Why hasn’t FBI mole Ray Epps been questioned, let alone prosecuted? Why isn’t Michael Byrd, the officer who shot Ashley Babbitt, on trial for murder? Where is John Sullivan, aka Jaden X, the anarchist and BLM activist who was paid by news outlets for his footage of what happened at the Capitol, and even filmed Babbitt’s death? These and other inconvenient truths deserve further exploration, and it appears that Carlson is now getting that chance.

In a surprising move, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is giving Carlson exclusive access to the 44,000 hours of January 6 footage that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sat on and refused to release. Carlson has proven himself to be fearless, and gives zero effs about what the legacy media thinks about how he handles his subject matter or his journalistic pursuits.

The legacy media wants you to care deeply what they think about this move, and are having apoplectic fits disguised as concerns for national security and the potential for another insurrection occurring in 2024.

Cry harder.

The Associated Press leads the charge:

Thousands of hours of surveillance footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol are being made available to Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson, a stunning level of access granted by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that Democrats swiftly condemned as a “grave” breach of security with potentially far-reaching consequences.

The hard-right political commentator said his team is spending the week at the Capitol poring through the video and preparing to reveal their findings to his viewers. But granting exclusive access to sensitive Jan. 6 security footage to such a deeply partisan figure is a highly unusual move, seen by some critics as essentially outsourcing House oversight to a TV personality who has promoted conspiracy theories about the attack.

Hmmm… is that anything like hiring a documentary producer to stage-manage the J-6 Committee Hearings?

Asking for a friend.

“It’s a shocking development that brings in both political concerns but even more importantly, security concerns,” said Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., who was a chief counsel during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial.

Many critics warn that Capitol security could be endangered if Carlson airs security footage that details how the rioters accessed the building and the routes lawmakers used to flee to safety. And a sharply partisan retelling of the Capitol attack could accelerate a dangerous rewriting of the history of what happened Jan. 6, when Trump encouraged a mob of supporters to head to the Capitol to overturn Joe Biden’s election.

Oh noes! Not, “Partisan retelling,” and “dangerous rewriting of history?!” Say it ain’t so! The fact that Trump’s recently released Twitter files and video footage of his speeches encouraging the crowds to depart the Capitol rally peacefully totally debunks their own partisan tellings of the events and how they occurred.

Everyone knew the January 6 Committee left out important material from its show hearings. Like this, which is critical but wouldn't have helped tell the story the committee's showrunner wanted to tell. And there was no opposition to object. From NBC: https://t.co/XpmTygXuLf pic.twitter.com/v38SsMIDbT

— Byron York (@ByronYork) February 1, 2023

But keep going with that line of attack, as it’s done them so well up to this point.

“It is not lost on anyone that the one person that the speaker decides to give hours and hours of sensitive secret surveillance footage is the person who peddled a bogus documentary trying to debunk responsibility for the Jan. 6 riot from Donald Trump onto others,” Goldman said.

“Kevin McCarthy has turned over the security of the Capitol to Tucker Carlson and that’s a scary thought,” he added.

McCarthy’s office declined to confirm the arrangement, first reported by Axios, despite repeated requests for comment.

Every day, US Govt officials (CIA/FBI/DOJ/Congress) handpick large media corporation to whom they give non-public info because they know they'll tell the story they want told: NYT, WPost, NBC, CNN, etc.

I want all this footage public but that this is unusual is laughable: https://t.co/PXUoWh5UpC

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 22, 2023

AP doesn’t give a rip about the security of the Capitol. If they did, they would have pushed then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and useless D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on why they refused then-President Trump’s offer of having the National Guard on the Mall that day. That should have been a focal point of the J-6 Committee Hearings: Pelosi’s dereliction of duty in leaving the Capitol defenseless.

But that would be too much like journalism, so, “Orange Man Bad” led the day.

CNN is also none too happy that they weren’t invited to this barbecue.

Carlson has been one of the most prominent promoters of January 6 conspiracy theories. Most notably, he has devoted significant airtime to the false claim that liberal “deep state” partisans within the FBI orchestrated the insurrection as a way to undermine former President Donald Trump. He has conducted sympathetic interviews with some of the rioters who were subsequently charged by the Justice Department.

As opposed to the interviews CNN conducted with the rioters because it’s actually newsworthy. Oh, wait…

Several GOP lawmakers within McCarthy’s ranks had hoped to review the material themselves, likely to hunt for footage that supports their controversial claims about the January 6 insurrection. By giving the videos to Carlson, McCarthy is essentially outsourcing the task to right-wing media, at least for the moment.

Ahh… the “outsourcing” narrative rears its head again. The Nation also takes this tack, and shows how this proves Speaker McCarthy is under the control of, <*clutch the pearls!*>, right-wing extremists.

In a shocking move that has so far been weirdly under-covered by the media, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy handed over roughly 44,000 hours of video footage of the January 6 insurrection to Fox News’s top sedition promoter, Tucker Carlson. Exclusively. Axios reported it Monday afternoon; Carlson confirmed it on his show Monday night.

Last seen, in a court filing released last week, worrying that debunking Donald Trump’s lies about the “theft” of the 2020 election was tanking the network’s stock price, Carlson has repeatedly defended the insurrectionists, suggesting that the FBI or other “deep state” forces actually touched off the violence, that it was a “false flag” operation. A propaganda film he created about the riot was so full of lies it drove conservative (but not batshit-crazy) news anchor Chris Wallace from Fox to CNN. Carlson is an embarrassment not only to Fox but to the entire nation.

Here’s the real problem: The legacy shops can no longer control the J-6 narrative, nor can they run interference, because they don’t have access. It’s a turn of the tables that they don’t like. Normally, they are the ones controlling the footage and blocking conservative and other media’s access (think the Hunter Biden laptop) to the facts on the ground. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, they are beside themselves trying to wrest control back and spin it to their advantage.

Too bad. So sad.