ARGUMENT: GUARDING DEMOCRACYHow Jan. 6 Committee Staffers Have Filled in the Blanks

Published 23 March 2023

According to Tucker Carlson, the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was not an attempted putsch but instead “mostly peaceful chaos.” Quinta Jurecic writes that the Fox News host’s revisionist take on Jan. 6 has so far received widespread condemnation, and that among the voices criticizing Carlson’s attempted rewriting of history have been staffers formerly on the Jan. 6 committee.

According to Tucker Carlson, the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was not an attempted putsch but instead “mostly peaceful chaos”: The “overwhelming majority” of rioters “were not insurrectionists,” he insisted. “They were sightseers.”

Quinta Jurecic writes in Lawfare that the Fox News host’s revisionist take on Jan. 6, aired following the decision of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy to share 41,000 hours of Capitol Police footage exclusively with Carlson’s team, has so far received widespread condemnation from the Capitol Police, the Justice Department, the White House, and Republican and Democratic members of Congress alike. Among the voices criticizing Carlson’s attempted rewriting of history have been staffers formerly on the Jan. 6 committee. 

She writes:

“I served as a senior professional staff member on the January 6th Select Committee and helped write its final report,” wrote Tom Joscelyn in Politico. “I got a close look at some of the video evidence that Carlson obtained—and his manipulation of the audience was immediately obvious to me.” In a PBS interview, former senior investigative counsel James Sasso rejected Carlson’s claim that Jan. 6 was not an insurrection as “objectively not true.” Sasso went on, “There’s nothing to hide in the footage. There’s nothing to hide in the interviews that we had with defendants. We put out all of our transcripts. We have backed it up.” And Timothy Heaphy, the committee’s chief investigative counsel, told MSNBC, “This narrative that this was largely a peaceful protest with people waving flags and taking smiling selfies is just wrong.”

These responses to Carlson are only three of many public comments made by former Jan. 6 committee staffers in the months since the committee closed its doors on Jan. 3, 2023. Staffers have written guest essays in the New York Times and articles in Lawfare;they’ve appeared on podcasts; they’ve given television interviews; and one, Sasso, even made an appearance on the NPR quiz show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” (Asked by host Peter Sagal if “there’s anything that you know, but you couldn’t prove, but you’re going to tell me anyway,” Sasso responded, “If I told you that, I would be in a lot of trouble.”) 

The interviews and writing by former staffers are particularly notable because the Jan. 6 report was such an incomplete and fragmentary document. Now, a look at what these staffers have said publicly—and what they haven’t—reveals key points about what the report did and didn’t contain. And it suggests what issues, and controversies, will remain important for the country to address going forward.

Jurecic concludes:

For all the work that remains to be done, the existence of the committee’s publicly accessible archive is, in a sense, a source of hope. It’s a commitment to the idea that the work can be done by engaged experts, journalists, and everyday people interested in digging through the documents. Kristin Amerling, who served as chief counsel and deputy staff director to the committee, commented at a Georgetown event that “the committee not only assiduously footnoted the various findings it made throughout the report, but it made every effort to provide the public the underlying information so that the public can draw their own conclusions and evaluate the basis of the committee’s findings.”

Likewise, there’s also an optimism to the idea that the existence and availability of these documents might help Americans understand the truth of what happened on Jan. 6, even amid lies like Carlson’s. “I’m really glad that all of our transcripts have been released,” Heaphy told the New York Times. “So if anyone thinks that we misled or shaded or hid facts, it’s all out there.” At a panel discussion following the news that Tucker Carlson would be broadcasting Jan. 6 footage, Sandeep Prasanna, a former investigative counsel for the committee, expressed a similar hope. This documentation, he said, ensures that, “regardless of whether someone is out there right now slicing and dicing surveillance footage to achieve whatever partisan or conspiratorial ends there may be, there is a factual record of what happened out there.”