Chris Cuomo insisted Monday night that he had “never” referred to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol as an “insurrection,” only for progressive commentator Mehdi Hasan to post “receipts” on social media that proved the NewsNation anchor had repeatedly called it just that.
During a panel debate on Cuomo’s primetime NewsNation program, Hasan was asked to “analyze” what he was hearing “from the left” in response to the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. The Zeteo founder, however, described reaction from the right and the Trump administration as very worrisome.
“We’re in a very dark moment, a very McCarthyite moment right now,” Hasan said. “The biggest point, which I think you glossed over, is the crackdown on free speech. This targeting of people for their views. I thought Charlie Kirk was supposed to be a free speech martyr. Why is the right using his death to crack down on free speech, American rights and go after this amorphous left?”
Several mainstream media figures have lost their jobs over comments and social media posts in the wake of Kirk’s death. While hosting Kirk’s daily radio show Monday, Vice President JD Vance vowed to dismantle left-wing groups and institutions that he claimed were promoting violence and terrorism, specifically naming George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation.
But on NewsNation, Hasan pointed to research that indicates right-wing extremism is actually responsible for more violence.
“You look at the ADL Center for Extremism, which looked at 444 people killed by extremists between 2013 and 2022, 75 percent of them by the right. You look at the University of Maryland study that was done for that terrorism center, which found them from 1948 to 2018, right-wing extremists more likely to carry out violence than left-wing extremists,” Hasan said.
“You look at the head of the FBI – who Donald Trump appointed – Chris Wray, who said the number one domestic terror threat in this country comes from religious and racially motivated extremists, specifically white supremacists.”
After ticking off other studies supporting his claims about right-wing extremism, the former MSNBC host pointed out that “the single biggest day of political violence” in recent memory was the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, which he noted was “ideologically motivated” by the right.
“You and I agreed it was an insurrection at the time,” Hasan said to Cuomo. “So it’s bizarre for Vance to go on TV or go online and say the exact opposite of what both the official statistics say and the think tanks say.”
But Cuomo pushed back on his description of the January 6 riots.
“One quick thing, I do not think January 6 was an insurrection. I thought it was all kinds of crimes,” Cuomo declared, before Hasan interjected that the ex-CNN anchor had “called it an insurrection at the time.”
Cuomo denied it, and insisted that he “never” called Jan 6 was an insurrection, while inviting Hasan to “show it to me” that he had.
“I never thought they were trying to take over the government. That’s what an insurrection is. But it doesn’t matter. It was bad,” Cuomo added.
Hours later, Hasan shared several tweets that Cuomo had posted in 2021 and 2022, where he called the January 6 attack an “insurrection,” and also criticized Republicans and conservatives for downplaying the violent event incited by Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
“You guys set a high bar by swallowing trump behavior and silence abt elex fraud bs,” Cuomo replied to a right-wing account in September 2022. “Not to mention the insurrection you guys all but ignored (after you ran for your lives).”
Reacting to another tweet in June 2021 — about the possibility of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy placing “insurrectionists” on the January 6 select committee — Cuomo said the “facts surrounding the infamy of the jan 6 insurrection will overpower any bulls***.”
Hasan also shared Cuomo’s post claiming Republican Senator Ron Johnson “denied the existence of a pandemic and of an insurrection” and accusing the “retrumplicans” of having “helped foment an insurrection.”
In his caption above Cuomo’s posts, Hasan thanked the anchor for having him on his show, while noting he was “just doing a factcheck” of their exchange.
“[Y]ou told me I was wrong & you had ‘never’ called Jan 6 an insurrection. I count at least 10 times on Twitter, back then, when you did call it an insurrection. And even mocked those who denied it. Some receipts,” Hasan wrote.
As of publication, Cuomo – who recently fell for an obviously fake AI video featuring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemning Sidney Sweeney’s blue jean ad – has yet to publicly respond to Hasan’s tweet or address his January 6 claims.
