Republicans work to rewrite history of Jan. 6 riot, hampering an inquiry
Rep. Clyde details scene as “normal tourist visit”
Four months after supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol in a deadly riot, a growing number of Republicans in Congress are mounting a wholesale effort to rewrite the history of what happened on Jan. 6, downplaying or outright denying the violence and deflecting efforts to investigate it.
Their denialism — which has intensified for weeks and was on vivid display this week at a pair of congressional hearings — is one reason that lawmakers have been unable to agree on forming an independent commission to scrutinize the assault on the Capitol. Republicans have insisted that any inquiry include an examination of violence by antifa, a loose collective of anti-fascist activists, and Black Lives Matter. It also reflects an embrace of misinformation that has become a hallmark of the Republican Party in the age of Trump.
“A denial of finding the truth is what we have to deal with,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday. “We have to find the truth, and we are hoping to do so in the most bipartisan way possible.”
She drew a direct link between Republicans’ ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming as their No. 3 leader — a move that stemmed from Cheney’s vocal repudiations of Trump’s election lies, which inspired the riot — and their refusal to acknowledge the reality of what happened on Jan. 6.
A House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on the riot Wednesday underlined the Republican strategy. Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, chairman of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, used his time to show video of mob violence purportedly by antifa that had unfolded 2,800 miles away in Portland, Oregon.
Another Republican, Rep. Andrew Clyde of
Georgia, described the scene during the assault and its aftermath — which resulted in the deaths of four police officers and injured nearly 140 others — as appearing like a “normal tourist visit” to the Capitol.
“Let’s be honest with the American people: It was not an insurrection,” Clyde said, adding that the House floor was never breached and that no firearms had been confiscated. “There was an undisciplined mob. There were some rioters, and some who committed acts of vandalism.”
He then asked Jeffrey Rosen, who was the acting attorney general at the time of the attack, whether he considered it “an insurrection, or a riot with vandalism, similar to what we saw last summer,” apparently referring to racial justice protests that swept across the country.
Immediately after the attack, many Republicans joined Democrats in condemning the violent takeover of the building known as the citadel of American democracy. But in the weeks that followed, Trump, abetted by right-wing news outlets and a few members of Congress, pushed the fiction that it had been carried out by antifa and Black Lives Matter, a claim that the federal authorities have repeatedly debunked. Now, a much broader group of Republican lawmakers have settled on a more subtle effort to cloud and distort what happened.
The approach has hampered the creation of an independent commission, modeled after the one that delved into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, to look into the Capitol riot, its roots and the government’s response.