Former GOP congressional aide Brendan Buck can't understand why House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) would reopen the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on Congress and the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election in the minds of Americans.
Speaking to MSNBC on Wednesday morning, Buck said that he suspected it might be another one of the "deals" McCarthy made to clinch the top spot in the House.
"That's what's so confounding about this. Why are we even talking about this?" asked Buck. "Why Kevin McCarthy felt it was a good idea to reopen this conversation? Obviously, Kevin McCarthy is trying to placate some of his members who think that this is a debate worth having. The world that House Republicans live in, especially as compared to Senate Republicans — Senators, obviously, represent an entire state. These Republicans represent deep-red districts where so many of those voters only get their news from very conservative outlets, and there it has been going on for two years now, a concerted effort to either downplay what happened on Jan. 6 and affirm in some people's minds that the election was, in fact, stolen."
Brendan was a press secretary for House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and was counselor to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI). He explained that there are few consequences to actual GOP members in such far-right districts. For senators, however, they must appeal to a broader electorate, including moderate Republicans and independent voters.
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"I would say, being on the right side of a Fox News personality is probably the biggest thing that you could do in Republican politics right now," Buck continued. "And Tucker Carlson's voice is much more powerful than Mitch McConnell, for example. That's why you're seeing House Republicans being not terribly upset, frankly, about what Kevin McCarthy has done here. What Tucker Carlson has done here. I'm really glad that some Senators have spoken out, but it speaks to how our party is so built on telling people what they want to hear."
He went on to say that for many months the Jan. 6 Committee controlled the narrative and that there were likely things they didn't focus on that are legitimate to bring up. The law enforcement piece of the argument has been largely quiet, for example.
"Why was the Capitol not prepared? What were the security failures?" he asked. It was recently revealed that the Justice Department wouldn't do any investigation into the failures of the FBI to alert the Capitol to the attacks they knew were coming.
"But the opposite side of that story is not that what happened on Jan. 6 was not a big deal," he explained. "Transparency is not the same as propaganda. And what Tucker Carlson was doing was propaganda, and I think all of these people who lived through this, whose lives were endangered in some ways from this should be a little more out outraged. This is a building they all work in that is almost sacred to a lot of us. It is the job of the House Speaker to protect that building. I don't just mean promoting, you know, a positive discourse. I mean, literally, the security is your responsibility, and so the fact that they're downplaying this is really disturbing to me as someone who spent a lot of time in that place."
Wednesday morning, Republican Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) held a press conference where he told the media that the reason they handed over the footage to Carlson was for "transparency purposes." They haven't given the footage to anyone other than Carlson and they haven't been transparent about what is on the over 40,000 hours of tape, much less released it to the public.
See the full discussion about the matter in the video below or at the link here.