- Rep. Liz Cheney revealed that Fox News hosts texted Mark Meadows during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
- "The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home," wrote Laura Ingraham.
- But that night, she suggested that "Antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd."
On January 6, Fox News host Laura Ingraham told former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that President Donald Trump needed to tell his supporters, who had stormed the Capitol, to go home. But then she later went on to suggest that Antifa may have played a role in the riot.
"Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy," Ingraham, a staunch Trump ally, wrote in a text message to Meadows during the riot.
The revelation came on Monday night, when Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming read the texts that Ingraham and other Fox News hosts sent to Meadows during the Capitol riot.
The texts were provided to the committee by Meadows himself, who was cooperating with the body for a time before eventually refusing to cooperate further amid the former president's claims of executive privilege.
—January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) December 14, 2021
Ingraham was one of several Fox News hosts that seemed to privately blame Trump for the riot, only to take a different position on air later that day.
At 4pm, while Capitol remained unsecured, Ingraham called into Fox's live coverage of the riot and speculated about "Antifa threatening to show up at the same time" as Trump supporters, suggesting that it wasn't the president's supporters themselves who had caused the riot.
"We'll learn more about the extent to which that happened," she added.
—Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 6, 2021
Later that night, she led her show by decrying the riot and saying that it could only have been caused by people "antithetical to the MAGA movement." She then went on to suggest that "they were likely not all Trump supporters and there are some reports that Antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled among the crowd.
—Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) December 14, 2021
Since Ingraham's comments in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, she has not revisited the conspiracy theory on her primetime show, falling in line with other major conservative media personalities who initially floated the baseless claims only to later portray the Capitol breach as the result of a few bad actors and poor security.
Elsewhere at Fox News, Tucker Carlson has doubled down on his whitewashing of Jan. 6 and released a three-part miniseries pushing a demonstrably false conspiracy theory that the US military and the FBI secretly plotted the attack.