Newly revealed surveillance footage from Jan. 6, 2021, shows two Capitol police officers escorting Jacob Chansley, the be-horned so-called “QAnon Shaman” who has come to symbolize the riot, through the halls of the Capitol and to the very door of the US Senate.
The footage aired on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show Monday night shows the officers closely following Chansley as he wanders the corridors of the Capitol, bare-chested and wearing face paint and a luxuriant fur hat with Viking horns.
“Virtually every moment of his time inside the Capitol was caught on tape,” says Carlson, who was granted exclusive access by Speaker Kevin McCarthy to 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from that day inside and around the Capitol, which has never been seen before by the public.
“The tapes show the Capitol police never stopped Jacob Chansley. They helped him. They acted as his tour guides.”
Then they escort him to various entrances of the chamber which appear to be locked. Eventually they help him open a door, and he enters the chamber.
Chansley, a 33-year-old naval veteran from Arizona, has been jailed for almost four years for “obstructing an official proceeding.”
In a jailhouse interview played by Carlson he says: “The one very serious regret that I have [is] believing that when we were waved in by police officers that it was acceptable.”
In a statement the Capitol police suggest that one of the officers with Chansley was trying to “de-escalate” the situation because he was outnumbered.
But that does not explain why Chansley, who was unarmed, was able to walk past seven more officers without being apprehended.
“Not one of them even tried to slow him down,” says Carlson.
He “understood that the Capitol police were his allies. . . . If he was in the act of committing such a grave crime, why didn’t the officers standing right next to him place him under arrest?”
And yet in the narrative formed that day by the Democrats and much of the media, “Jacob Chansley became the face of January 6, a dangerous conspiracy theorist dressed in an outlandish costume who led the violent insurrection to overthrow America’s democracy,” says Carlson.
McCarthy has been criticized for releasing the footage to Carlson who plans to air five stories based on the footage over two nights which he says “demolishes” the Democratic narrative of January 6.
As well as Chansley’s story, Carlson will air footage which he says debunks the claim that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by rioters.