A website launched by Donald Trump’s administration cements the president’s false narrative about the 2020 presidential election on the fifth anniversary of the January 6 mob’s attack on the Capitol.
The White House website amplifies false claims that have been central to Trump’s political crusade, downplays the assault in the halls of Congress and blames law enforcement officers for “deliberately escalating tensions” while hundreds of Trump’s supporters swarmed and attacked them on January 6, 2021.
Democratic leadership, not then-President Trump and administration officials, failed to secure the Capitol that day and put peoples’ lives in danger, while then-Vice President Mike Pence, who resisted Trump’s attempts to overturn election results, failed to dispute Joe Biden’s victory “in an act of cowardice and sabotage,” according to the website.
As a result, a “stolen election was certified,” the website falsely states.
The Trump administration launched the website as dozens of rioters returned to Washington, D.C., — five years after the attack and nearly one year after Trump granted sweeping pardons for virtually all of them.
Among them was former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 22 years in prison before he was pardoned by Trump on his first day in office last year.
Trump granted those “blanket pardons and commutations” for “patriotic Americans” who “mere trespassers or peaceful protesters treated as insurrectionists” under the Biden administration, according to Trump’s website.
More than 1,000 defendants pleaded guilty to charges in connection with the attack, and more than 200 others were found guilty at trial, including 10 defendants who were found guilty of treason-related charges including seditious conspiracy.
In the streets of Washington, D.C., Tuesday on the five-year anniversary, dozens of those pardoned sparred with counter-protesters who called them “terrorists” and “traitors” and sang along with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A” and a version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” recorded by imprisoned rioters.
Despite those pardons and the administration’s apparent endorsement of their behavior, recipients of the president’s clemency are still consumed by baseless conspiracy theories about what happened, insisting that the attack was an “inside job” and part of a “deep state” plot to frame them.
While marching to the Ellipse Tuesday, pardoned rioters and supporters held up banners reading “J6 WAS A SETUP ARREST PELOSI” and “J6 WAS AN INSIDE JOB” while they raged against officials they claim have not yet been held accountable for their prosecution.
They demanded the impeachment of judges who presided over their cases and for mass firings of FBI agents and federal prosecutors who investigated them.
“Retribution comes for you,” Tarrio told the crowd.
Micki Witthoeft — the mother of Ashli Babbit, who was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer after Babbitt tried to breach the Speaker’s Lobby — said Congress “let us down and continues to let us down.”
A report from the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General found no evidence that the FBI had undercover employees in the crowds. The FBI deployed resources to the Capitol after the building had been breached by rioters and after reports that pipe bombs were discovered at the Republican and Democratic national party headquarters.
That report also said that none of the 26 FBI informants in Washington, D.C., that day were instructed to join the mob or otherwise encourage illegal activity.
But the administration is now amplifying a baseless conspiracy theory that the riot was fueled by an “FBI entrapment operation” designed to target Trump supporters.
Ray Epps, who has been at the center of a conspiracy theory alleging federal agents pushed the mob to break into the Capitol, was “charged only minimally” for his role in the riots, according to the White House website.
“Democrats successfully flipped the narrative to brand peaceful protesters as ‘insurrectionists’ — while waging the true insurrection against a legitimate election,” the website says.
The 2020 election “is considered the greatest election theft in U.S. history, with widespread fraud deliberately ignored by courts, officials and the media,” according to the White House.
Trump’s false and inflated claims about elections that were “stolen” and “rigged” against him and his allies have repeatedly been shot down in court, and his administration and campaign have failed to produce any evidence to support it.
Federal judges who presided over dozens of January 6 cases have warned against attempts to rewrite the history of the attack as Justice Department officials brought the prosecutions to a screeching halt.
District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said that lengthy court filings — including “thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions” — will preserve the history of what happened that day, regardless of the public narrative from the Trump administration.
“Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened,” she wrote last year. “Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies.”
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