Tucker Carlson Claims There's 'No Evidence' Assad Was Behind Deadly Chemical Attack in Syria or That It Even Happened

On Tuesday evening's Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, the host claimed that there's no evidence Syrian President Bashar Assad was behind the 2018 attack on Douma and argued the attack might never have happened.

Carlson has been pushing this narrative since the Syrian suburb was attacked in April 2018 by what the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said was a chemical attack.

During Carlson's show, he replayed a monologue from 2018, during which he urged viewers to be skeptical of the attack because "geniuses" are "making it up."

"Universal bi-partisan agreement on anything is usually the first sign that something deeply unwise is about to happen, if only because there is nobody left to ask skeptical questions, and we should be skeptical of this, starting with the poison gas attack itself," said Carlson. "All the geniuses tell us that Assad killed those children, but do they really know that? Of course they don't really know that, they're making it up. They have no real idea what happened."

The Fox News host has renewed this skepticism of the Douma incident in light of an email that Wikileaks reportedly published from a member of the OPCW who accused the team of covering up "discrepancies." The OPCW was tasked by the United Nations to investigate the attack and find the responsible parties.

Like Carlson, Russia and the country's allies have used this email to question the OPCW's conclusions that chlorine was likely dropped from an aircraft in Douma. Some have also promoted a misinformation campaign that reportedly hopes to discredit the OPCW's findings in an effort to absolve Assad.

After the WikiLeaks document was released, investigative journalists at Bellingcat discovered that the leaked letter, which supports Carlson's narrative, actually referred to an "interim report" released in July 2018. This was before the OPCW released its final conclusions about Douma which reflected the concerns of the employee behind the email.

"A comparison of the points raised in the letter against the final Douma report makes it amply clear that the OPCW not only addressed these points, but even changed the conclusion of an earlier report to reflect the concerns of said employee," wrote the investigation team.

"Although this letter appears to be at least superficially damaging to the OPCW, after reading the actual reports published by the OPCW it is clear that this letter is outdated and inapplicable to the final Douma report," they concluded.

On Tuesday's show, Carlson also suggested that no American had seen the attack, therefore maybe it didn't exist.

"The justification for this was a supposed chemical weapons attack in the town of Douma. Now, no one in Washington had seen the attack—no American had seen it," he said. "Nobody in Congress could tell you what proof existed that the attack had actually taken place or that Assad's government was behind it, rather than some other faction—and there were many in the country's civil war."