McCarthy Gave Tucker the Jan. 6 Tapes. Trump Allies Are Threatening to Sue

When House speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a leading Jan. 6 revisionist, exclusive access this month to a vast archive of unseen surveillance footage of the deadly Capitol riot, he — expectedly — pissed off the left. But the Republican lawmaker’s move didn’t just infuriate his liberal counterparts, who accused him and Fox of working to rewrite history and potentially even inviting new “security risks.” 

McCarthy’s gift to Carlson immediately triggered a right-wing media feud, and drew the scorn of multiple high-profile Donald Trump allies. And it quickly led to McCarthy getting legally threatened by the former president’s favorite election-attacking pillow mogul who’s using a pair of extremely pro-Trump lawyers, one of whom sued the January 6th House committee. 

Meanwhile, for all the hoopla McCarthy has created in MAGAland with these tapes, some Republicans and Democrats who’ve already seen the footage tell Rolling Stone that they know what Carlson has in store. And they aren’t particularly impressed. 

On Monday, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — a close Trump associate who has been one of the largest financial backers of the election-denialism movement since late 2020 — told Rolling Stone he’s now working with two attorneys, Doug Wardlow and Pat McSweeney, to file a lawsuit against McCarthy as soon as within the “next few days.” Lindell says he and his legal team have drafted a suit arguing his streaming program, Lindell TV, is being “injured” and discriminated against by not enjoying equal access to the unreleased Jan. 6 trove. The Trump ally, who often finds himself to the pro-Trump right of Fox News, notes that he doesn’t trust Fox’s “agenda” with these tapes, and dubs McCarthy’s decision “disgusting” and allegedly unconstitutional.

“As you correctly and publicly stated, the footage ‘belong[s] to the American public.’ Accordingly, I request the same access for my media company, Lindell TV,” the MyPillow CEO wrote to McCarthy in a Feb. 23 letter he provided to Rolling Stone. “Please have your staff reach out to me to arrange for access.”

As it were, lawyer Charles Tobin — on behalf of news organizations such as Axios, ProPublica, and Politico — sent a letter to congressional leaders last week, calling for broader media access to the videos, writing that “the incredible public interest in understanding what transpired on January 6 crosses party lines.”

Lindell, for his part, says he hasn’t received a response, though he wasn’t expecting McCarthy to yield. So, he says, “We are getting the lawsuit ready.” Reached by phone on Monday afternoon, Lindell said he’s pushing his legal team to file the lawsuit against McCarthy this week. Lindell then patched Wardlow in on the call, who told Lindell that the lawyers are working on it, but that pulling together the constitutional arguments and theories would take “at least several days” before it’s ready to file.

Lindell says he tapped the two attorneys to file the suit, both of whom have previously weighed in on Jan. 6-related cases. Wardlow, who ran as a Republican candidate for Minnesota attorney general, pledged in 2022 that if elected he would “go to bat” for Minnesotans charged by federal prosecutors in connection with the insurrection.

McSweeney, another longtime Lindell attorney, filed a number of lawsuits on behalf of the pillow executive. He sued former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the January 6th House committee in 2022 to challenge a subpoena from the panel for Lindell’s phone records. Shortly after the 2020 election, McSweeney also co-authored a series of legal memos for The Western Journal arguing that state legislatures and the Justice Department could overturn the election. His co-author, William J. Olson, later included similar arguments in a memo sent to Trump in late December 2020.

A spokesperson for McCarthy did not respond to questions on Monday, and McCarthy himself has been recently dodging questions from NBC News and other outlets about the issue. Lawyers for Lindell did not immediately return Rolling Stone’s requests for comment. 

Though Lindell appears to be the most aggressive with McCarthy’s office, there are other prominent figures in conservative media and Trumpland circles who are slamming McCarthy’s Carlson favoritism as a self-inflicted blunder.

“Why not other media? Why not Newsmax? Why did he just give one host, on one cable network, this information?” Eric Bolling, another longtime friend of Trump’s, said on his Newsmax TV show on Thursday. During Trump’s failed effort to cling to power following the 2020 presidential election, Fox brass were actively worried that Newsmax was pulling away too many of the cable-news giant’s viewers, as the two channels competed to attract Trump-loving, election-denying demographics.

“Hey, Speaker McCarthy, send it over. I’ll be the Newsmax representative to go over this information. Why wouldn’t he? Look, if Nancy Pelosi had this information and this data that she gave just to Rachel Maddow, to be honest with you, I’d be calling her out for the same thing,” Bolling continued. “So, Speaker McCarthy, my inbox is wide open…We’d love to get our hands on that.”

On the same program, Trump’s lead attorney in the plot to steal the 2020 election, Rudy Giuliani, added: “To give it to just [Tucker]…is a terrible mistake…I don’t know why [McCarthy] did that. I’m going to attribute it to a terrible mistake that creates an issue that doesn’t have to exist.”

Well before the GOP took back the House in the 2022 midterm elections, twice-impeached former President Trump had privately insisted to Republican lawmakers that, should they retake the lower chamber, they needed to make it a top priority to use their powers to try to shift blame off Trump for Jan. 6 — and to indulge conspiracy theories about the anti-democratic assault. McCarthy’s special treatment towards Carlson isn’t all that shocking, given the Fox primetime star’s clear influence on today’s Republican Party and standing among the conservative elite. Still, Carlson has been rough at times on McCarthy in recent years, and hasn’t been shy about openly mocking the congressman on his Fox show.

And while McCarthy’s handover of Capitol Police footage to Carlson has caused drama within the broader MAGA movement, those familiar with what’s on the recordings find the far-right’s fascination with the footage absurd, though not altogether surprising, according to two people familiar with the reportedly more than 40,000 hours of video. 

“The select committee reviewed not only this footage but also body-worn camera footage from Metropolitan Police Department, footage from documentary filmmakers — including one crew that was embedded with the Proud Boys — and then also countless videos that were posted on social media,” Thomas Joscelyn, a former January 6 Committee staffer tells Rolling Stone. “There is abundant video evidence of what happened that day. It’s not like there’s a dearth of video. Quite the opposite.”