Ahead of the third anniversary of the January 6 Capitol riot, former president Donald Trump baselessly cast blame on Antifa and the FBI as the main proponents of the attack.
“By the way, there was Antifa, there was FBI, there were a lot of other people there too leading the charge,” Mr Trump said at a rally in Sioux, Center Iowa on Friday, 5 January. “You saw the same people that I did.”
Mr Trump also said at the campaign event that he believed the audience on January 6, 2021 was the “biggest crowd, I believe, I ever spoke to—you never hear about that do you?”
He then turned to “the hostages,” seemingly referring to those arrested and charged for their actions on January 6. “The J6 hostages, I call them. Nobody’s been treated ever in history so badly as those people,” he said.
Their imprisonment, Mr Trump said, will go down as “one of the saddest things in the history of our country. And they went there to protest a rigged election.”
The Justice Department reported since the 2021 riot, over 1,200 individuals have been charged with crimes connected to the Capitol attack, while more than 700 people have pleaded guilty to various federal charges.
Saturday, January 6, 2024 marks three years since the violent attack on the Capitol building, which led to the deaths of four rioters and five police officers and left many more injured.
Mr Trump’s false claims about the Capitol riot and 2020 election fraud come as he faces his own accusations federally and in Georgia regarding his alleged efforts to overturn the presidential election.
In its final report in 2022, the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack also named Mr Trump as the “central cause” of the riot “whom many others followed.”
Despite the “rigged election” claims, the former president is running again — and holds a substantial lead in the GOP polls. His campaign speech in Iowa comes less than two weeks before the state’s caucuses, which kick off the primary elections.
