Fox News' Bret Baier Hits Out At Republicans Dismissing Capitol Riot Inquiry

"You cannot watch this testimony and say that it’s not a big deal," the Fox News anchor said.
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Fox News anchor Bret Baier on Tuesday criticized Republicans who have downplayed the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol or have sought to discredit the congressional inquiry into what happened.

“While Republicans politically are saying that this is a partisan effort and that they charge that it’s not going to get to the questions that they think are important about Jan. 6 — ‘Why were the Capitol Police so ill-prepared for what happened that day?’ ― you cannot watch this testimony and say that it’s not a big deal,” he said during the conservative network’s coverage of the House select committee’s first hearing on its investigation.

“And you cannot watch this testimony and say that there are questions that are going to take us places that I don’t think we know where we’re going to go yet.”

Earlier, Baier described the testimony as “compelling, at times damning, emotional.”

“For anybody who looked at that and looked at the videos and their testimony about that day and thought that it was not violent, I think that was an eye-opener,” he said.

Four police officers who fought a violent mob of Donald Trump’s supporters during the Jan. 6 attack testified before the committee Tuesday about what they experienced. The officers described brutal violence and fears for their lives. A Black officer said he was repeatedly subjected to racial slurs. More than 500 people have been arrested in connection with the attack that injured an estimated 140 police officers who were trying to defend the Capitol.

Yet many Republicans have continued to downplay the events of that day and discredit the Democratic-led effort to get to the bottom of it.

This includes some of Baier’s colleagues. Prime-time Fox News commentators, such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, persistently push revisionist history about Jan. 6. Last week, Carlson insulted one of the officers ahead of his testimony Tuesday, dismissing him as a political activist.

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