The leader of the U.S. Capitol Police issued a memo to his entire staff this past Tuesday in the wake of Fox News host Tucker Carlson airing dramatic and previously unseen footage from the security cameras from the January 6 riot which put a spotlight on a police officer that seemed to be standing alongside or just passively by as people rushed into the Capitol.
Tom Manager, the current Police Chief, openly criticized the statements made by “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” which he said were “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions” regarding the events of January 6, 2021, the day a large group of people made their way into the main U.S. Capitol building, which ended up disrupting legislators that were trying to certify the 2020 election victory of President Joe Biden.
“The program conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video,” explained Manager. “The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments.”
NEW – Capitol Police chief Thomas Manger sends internal memo this am saying Carlson’s report was “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions” about Jan. 6 and says the “opinion program” never reached out with appropriate context. Reporting w/ @rachelvscott pic.twitter.com/BrnD0n4IN1
— Katherine Faulders (@KFaulders) March 7, 2023
Manager seemingly took extreme issue with a segment showing what seemed to be a few Capitol Police officers calmly escorting Jacob Chansley, who is more widely known as the “QAnon Shaman,” all over the building as some kind of “tour guides” as Carlson spoke about them, and Carlson’s strong focus on Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who a medical examiner discovered in a later examination had actually had a stroke and died of natural causes a full day in the wake of the event that took place on January 6.
A report from the New York Times that went out on the 8th of January stated that Sicknick had been beaten to death using a fire extinguisher as a weapon while the riot was happening, but close to five weeks later the story was quietly pulled down when it was announced that he died the next day of exactly what the D.C. medical examiner stated were actually just natural causes. His family and the police think his death had been related to the events of the riot.
Footage of the officer seemingly guiding around people around the Capitol building after the time “he was supposedly murdered outside,” stated Carlson, “overturns the single-most powerful and politically useful lie the Democrats have told us about January 6.”
The Capitol Police, explained Manger, “maintains, as anyone with common sense would, that had Officer Sicknick not fought valiantly for hours on the day he was violently assaulted, Officer Sicknick would not have died the next day.”