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- The Jan. 6 committee said Trump was ultimately to blame for the 2021 Capitol riot.
- Trump responded by calling members “sick people” and played down the siege.
- He said the committee “did not produce a single shred of evidence” he wanted violence.
Former President Donald Trump railed against the January 6 committee after it blamed him for the 2021 riot at the US Capitol, downplaying the riot, calling the committee members “very bad people,” and repeating his voter fraud conspiracy theories.
Trump talked about the committee in a video he shared on his Truth Social platform on Friday, saying: “These are sick people. These are Marxists. And they’re very dangerous and very bad people.”
—Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) December 23, 2022
He also said in the video that “The events of January 6 were not an insurrection. They were a protest that got tragically out of control.”
He said the committee “did not produce a single shred of evidence that I in any way intended or wanted violence at our Capitol.”
“The evidence does not exist because the claim is baseless and a monstrous lie.”
Protesters storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington D.C.
John Minchillo/AP
The January 6 committee released its final report on Thursday . It said that Trump’s actions, including not instructing his “violent supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol,” were part of his “multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 Presidential election.”
The committee said that its conclusion was that “the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.”
It said that Trump “specifically and repeatedly refused” to tell his supporters to leave the Capitol “for multiple hours.”
Trump, in his video, pushed back against this allegation, saying he sent two tweets “within 25 minutes of the Capitol bridge, and another statement 30 minutes after that.”
But the committee’s report said that the tweets did not tell the rioters to leave the Capitol and that neither tweet “made any difference.”
Rioters and police at the Capitol riot.
DOJ
In the rambling video, Trump also called the FBI raid on his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort in August a “Marxist hoax” and “a big hoax” and said it was run by a “Trump hater.”
The FBI’s search warrant indicated the Justice Department is investigating if Trump violated three federal laws, including the Espionage Act, when he brought government documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago when his time as president ended.
Trump also went after the committee’s report in a separate Truth Social post on Thursday, calling it a “highly partisan Unselect Committee Report.”
The comments echo his previous attacks on the committee.
In March, he said the committee used “lies and Marxist tactics.”
