JD Vance Staffer Buckley Carlson Was Reportedly At The Capitol During January 6 Riots

Tucker Carlson's son Buckley Carlson now has a job working for Vice President JD Vance as his deputy press secretary. Buckley's job in the office of the VP has a lot of people alleging that his dad unfairly pulled the strings to get him the position. While we don't know the exact particulars of how Buckley got the job, we do know that he has worked in Washington D.C. before. He had a job with Republican Representative Jim Banks from Indiana from July 2019 to January 2025. In fact, Buckley was apparently in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when thousands of pro-Trump supporters broke into the Capitol and attempted to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president.

Tucker, a conservative firebrand formerly of Fox News, talked about January 6 on "The Fourth Watch Podcast." He said, "Well, I hated what happened on Jan. 6, you know one of my kids was actually in the building when it had happened; I was on the phone in real time," according to The Hill. Of Tucker's four kids, Buckley, with his job for Rep. Banks, is the only one who seemed to have been a potential candidate for being in Washington D.C. during the riot. Despite any possible worries that he may have had for his son during the January 6 unrest, Tucker was one of many who said that the day's events weren't actually perpetrated by Trump supporters.

Buckley Carlson doesn't seem to have spoken publicly about the events of January 6. And we're not sure how much, if any, of Buckley's perspective Tucker Carlson used when he presented his own take on what happened on January 6 in a short docuseries called "Patriot Purge," which aired on Fox Nation in late 2021. It embraced the conspiracy theory that it was not Donald Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol, but instead, people from within the government itself and others who were trying to make Trump and those who support him look bad. As well as hinting that it was Buckley that was in the Capitol on January, Tucker talked more broadly about the series on "The Fourth Watch Podcast," reiterating that he felt there was something wrong with how it was being reported in the media.

Tucker left Fox News in April 2023. This was not long after the channel paid a multi-million dollar settlement with Dominion, a voting company, which Fox News hosts had falsely said had a hand in impacting the results of the 2020 election. Upon returning to office, Trump pardoned all January 6 rioters who'd been convicted of crimes.