It’s been less than 48 hours after Fox News host Tucker Carlson started peddling a conspiracy theory that the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building was orchestrated by the FBI, and already, Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert is demanding an investigation. No stranger to crackpot theories, Gohmert took to the floor on Thursday to support an investigation into the insurrection, which was a surprising about-face after Gohmert previously sided with Republicansm who did not want to open a commission looking into the attack sparked by a Donald Trump rally. Via Raw Story:
“We really need to know what the FBI knew and when they knew it,” said Gohmert. “And not only that, we need to know how much participation did any of our federal friends, either at DOJ, at FBI, or any at the intel community — what kind of role were they playing,” he said. “Because there’s information that came out about the effort to kidnap the Michigan governor and there were federal agents. So, it’s been said that there were federal agents involved in that.”
Again, the conspiracy theory can be directly traced back to Carlson who devoted a portion of his Tuesday night broadcast to heavily insinuating that the FBI was behind the January 6 attack because some of the protestors have not been charged yet.
“The government knows who they are, but they have not charged them. Why is that? You know why,” Carlson said. “They were all certainly working for the FBI. So FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol, on Jan. 6, according to government documents!”
Naturally, Gohmert was one of the first Republican politicians to bite on the theory and demand an investigation. Earlier in the month, the GOP congressman actually suggested that the government should somehow alter the Earth’s orbit around the sun to stop climate change, so we’re not exactly dealing with the sharpest tool in the shed.
(Via Raw Story)