Fox News host Tucker Carlson reacted Wednesday night to Louisville police officers dodging charges in the killing of Breonna Taylor by claiming Black Lives Matter had peddled a “lie” about the 26-year-old’s fatal shooting, all while falsely accusing Taylor’s boyfriend of being a drug dealer.
With protests erupting in Louisville hours after a grand jury decided not to charge three cops with killing Taylor, Carlson recapped the decision while complaining about the way Taylor’s death had been portrayed by social justice activists and the press.
“In March, three Louisville police officers served a search warrant at the apartment of a woman called Breonna Taylor,” Carlson said. “They knocked outside and announced they were from the police department and then they entered the apartment.”
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While Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron said that one civilian witness testified they heard police announce themselves before breaking through Taylor’s door, media interviews with residents at the complex reveal that the vast majority didn’t hear the officers do that. The New York Times found one neighbor, who was directly above the apartment, say they heard the police announce themselves.
Carlson went on to note that Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend who was at the apartment that night, fired on the police after they entered the apartment. Walker has maintained that he never heard the officers announce themselves as police and believed someone was breaking in. But Carlson portrayed the incident as an attack on police officers by someone who he mistakenly referred to as “supposedly a drug dealer.”
“Walker was Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend—he was also supposedly a drug dealer,” Carlson declared. “That was one of the reasons the police were there. Walker admits that he fired first and that he shot a police officer.”
Walker, however, was nowhere to be found on any of the series of warrants that were served by police, including the “no-knock” warrant on Taylor’s apartment by three plainclothes policemen. Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, Jemarcus Glover, was the subject of the investigation by Louisville police, while Walker has no drug offenses to his name.
Glover, meanwhile, has accused Louisville prosecutors of trying to bribe him with a plea deal in order to incriminate Taylor, claiming they offered a lighter sentence in exchange for testimony that Taylor was part of a criminal organization. Glover currently faces charges of drug trafficking and criminal syndication.
Carlson would go on to say “those are the facts of the case” before turning his ire towards Black Lives Matter, saying “BLM lied about how Breonna Taylor died” and that her killing was falsely described as a “murder.”
Towards the end of his program, however, Carlson issued an on-air correction about how he described Walker, insisting he “inadvertently” mixed up Walker and Glover.
“We made a mistake at the top of the show and we want to correct it, as we always do,” the Fox News host stated. “We flipped the names around of a couple people inadvertently. We said police believed Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend was a drug dealer—he might have been. We meant to say her ex-boyfriend. We wanted to correct that, sorry.”
