“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough is concerned that Kevin McCarthy’s release of Jan. 6 security footage to Tucker Carlson will lead to another riot, as the panel discussed Tuesday the Fox News host’s rewriting and downplaying of the insurrection on the Capitol.
“There you go again promoting violence and praising those committing violence against cops,” Scarborough said. “This is once again the abandonment of the blue. Once again the abandonment of police officers.”
He continued: “You can’t say ‘the Republican Party.’ This is a segment of the Republican Party, in the House especially, that are trying to grant absolution by lying about those people, those rioters that beat the hell out of police officers.”
Scarborough also called McCarthy’s release of the footage a “serious breach.”
“It’s outrageous and it’s dangerous, and all of this encourages a next attack,” he said. “But just politically, just for one second: Americans aren’t gonna back a faction of a party that support violence against police officers. Americans aren’t going to support a faction of a party that support riots on January the 6th and the overturning of a peaceful presidential election. And for Kevin McCarthy to think anything less than that? It’s outrageous.”
Michael Steele, a MSNBC analyst, diagreed and warned Americans about what’s at stake with the next election cycle.
“Americans have backed an insurrectionist party, they reelected them to power in November,” he said. “If Kevin McCarthy is not Speaker of the House, he is not beholden to Marjorie Taylor Greene and this faction in a way that these clips would never be released. That’s the consequence of our voting people into power who are anti-democratic, who are narcissistic, very much like Trump in the sense that their own self interest is the prevailing interest.”
Steele also touched on how this issue gets “suppressed” amid rising gas prices, a failing economy, inflation and other events.
“Once they get back in power, where is the border policy? Where’s the healthcare policy? Where’s the transportation policy? But you know what is? Giving Tucker Carlson what he wants,” Steele said. “This is what we’re getting here, so let’s stop pretending you’re going to get anything different.”
“When you give the power back to the people that fermented insurrection, what the hell do you think you’ll get the next day?” he said.
But “Morning Joe” panelists weren’t the only ones outraged by Carlson’s rewriting of Jan. 6 history. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans spoke out against the Fox News host Tuesday after he called the attack “mostly peaceful chaos,” cherry-picking calm moments from the thousands of hours of security footage from that day.
Watch the full “Morning Joe” segment in the video above.
