A fired Capitol Police officer who helped evacuate the Capitol during the January 6 riots said supervisors went radio silent and told Tucker Carlson how he donned a red MAGA cap in order to make his way through a hostile crowd of protesters.

Tarik Johnson told the Fox News host in an interview aired Tuesday that his bosses seemed ill-prepared for the riot. He was trying to evacuate the Senate side of the building as the crowd became increasingly hostile, but could not get an answer, much less authorization.

“The person that I thought was going to authorize the evacuation … didn’t do it,” Johnson said, explaining that he called multiple times over the radio, asking repeatedly for permission to begin evacuating the Senate side of the building because he had a clear line of sight to a safe exit path.

He said dispatchers also assisted in calling for an evacuation, but the response from supervisors never came — and eventually, Johnson began escorting the senators to safety on his own. At one point he was told fellow officers were in need of help

Johnson, who said he was fired after being seen wearing the pro-Trump cap, said someone in the crowd put it on his head, and when the person asked for it back, Johnson kept it as an act of self-preservation while he rushed to the aid of his colleagues.

“I figured if I had the hat on, it’d be easier for me to navigate my way through the crowd,” he said. “It was basically self-preservation and de-escalation. And I needed to get up those steps. I couldn’t say what would have happened walking through that crowd without it.”

Johnson, who said he voted for Joe Biden in the hotly contested 2020 election, said that his top priority was getting “the members of Congress and their staff to safety.”

Carlson said that surveillance footage appears to corroborate Johnson’s account of what happened.

“A photo emerged of Johnson wearing a MAGA hat outside the Capitol,” Carlson said. “That picture cost him his career.”

Johnson said regarding wearing the hat, “sometimes I look at it and I’m like, ‘Thank you, God for blessing me with this hat. And sometimes I’m like, ‘Wow, I wish this hat never came in my life.'”

The interview followed Monday’s show in which Carlson aired some of the more than 40,000 hours of previously unreleased security video his team was given access to. The video showed that, at least at several points during the incident, police seemed to take a passive approach toward many of the people who entered the building. The footage also showed that in many cases the alleged rioters seemed to move through the building in a respectful and orderly fashion. But footage also showed many in the massive crowd breaking windows, scaling walls and clashing with police.

Former Capitol Police Officer Tarik Johnson tells Tucker Carlson he wore a MAGA hat during the January 6 riot so he could blend into the crowd and that it was an act of “self-preservation.”

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— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 8, 2023

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) slammed a CNN reporter during a brief interaction with reporters in which he answered questions about releasing footage from the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“Because of the footage that you gave Tucker Carlson, last night he went on and said this was a mostly peaceful chaos as he said, he downplayed Brian Sicknick’s death, said it was not related to January 6, that this was not an insurrection,” CNN’s Manu Raju said. “Do you regret giving him those [tapes] so he could whitewash the events of that day?”

“No. I said at the very beginning, ‘transparency,'” McCarthy said. “And so what I wanted to produce for everybody is exactly what I said, people can actually look at it and see what’s gone on that day.”

When asked if he agreed with Carlson’s portrayal of the events that took place on January 6, McCarthy said, “Each person can come up with their own conclusion.”

“But I just wanted to make sure I had transparency, because I know on CNN, I mean, I had here where you guys actually wrote where we were,” McCarthy continued as he held up the printed off CNN report. “This was a secret location … I don’t know if you got concerned by that, I don’t even know from a point of view of security if we could ever be taken there again. But when you broke that at CNN, that was a real concern to a lot of people.”

WATCH:

BREAKING: McCarthy defends Tucker release of J6 tapes, slams CNN pic.twitter.com/e6FxWHWoDf

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) March 8, 2023