Former President Donald Trump said he wanted to march to the Capitol after his rally on Jan. 6, 2021, but Secret Service stopped him.
Trump’s comments in the interview with The Washington Post were published Thursday.
“Secret Service said I couldn’t go,” Trump said. “I would have gone there in a minute.”
Some of the marchers stormed the Capitol as violence broke out outside the building. Trump blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for letting things get out of hand.
“I thought it was a shame, and I kept asking why isn’t she doing something about it?” he said. “Why isn’t Nancy Pelosi doing something about it? And the mayor of D.C. also.
“The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge. I hated seeing it. I hated seeing it. And I said, ‘It’s got to be taken care of,’ and I assumed they were taking care of it.”
The Post noted that Pelosi shares control of the Capitol with the Senate majority leader.
Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi, responded, telling the Post: “The former president’s desperate lies aside, the speaker was no more in charge of the security of the U.S. Capitol that day than Mitch McConnell."
Trump eventually released a video asking supporters to go home. The Post said it came 187 minutes after he had urged them to march to the Capitol during a rally near the White House.
The violence at the Capitol came shortly after the rally, where Trump spoke to a large crowd.
“The crowd was far bigger than I even thought,” he said. “ I believe it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to. I don’t know what that means, but you see very few pictures. They don’t want to show pictures; the fake news doesn’t want to show pictures. But this was a tremendous crowd.”
Trump said the select committee probing the Jan. 6 events has not contacted him. He said he didn't know what he would do if the panel did request his assistance.
“It depends what the request is,” he said.
Trump claimed the panel’s interview with his daughter, Ivanka, was a “shame and harassment.” However, he insisted he did not know what committee members had asked her.
Trump said he does not recall “getting very many” phone calls on Jan. 6 and insisted he did not remove any call logs.
Trump said he remembered talking to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and others.
“From the standpoint of telephone calls, I don’t remember getting very many,” he said, later adding, "Why would I care about who called me? If congressmen were calling me, what difference did it make? There was nothing secretive about it. There was no secret.”
Meanwhile, a review of Trump's Jan. 6, phone logs found that a seven-hour gap likely is not as eye-opening as critics claimed, CNN reported Friday.
A source told CNN that six pages of White House switchboard logs for Jan. 6 were complete based on an official review of records.
Jeffrey Rodack ✉
Jeffrey Rodack, who has nearly a half century in news as a senior editor and city editor for national and local publications, has covered politics for Newsmax for nearly seven years.
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