CNN anchor Phil Mattingly on Friday devoted a biting phase to the truth of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.
“Tomorrow will mark three years since thousands of Americans, lied to by the president of the United States and their elected representatives, perpetrated an assault on the building that has come to symbolize democracy across the globe, and the men and women who work on its grounds,” he stated on “CNN This Morning.”
“That’s not an opinion. It’s not an interpretation. It’s not one side of a debate. It is an unequivocal, demonstrable fact.”
Mattingly referred to as out a latest Associated Press article contrasting how the rebellion is described by President Joe Biden and predecessor Donald Trump, whose followers overran the Capitol. “One attack, two interpretations: Biden and Trump both make the Jan. 6 riot a political rallying cry,” learn the story’s headline.
“There aren’t, in fact, two interpretations,” Mattingly stated. “There is what happened, and then there are lies.”
To illustrate his level, the CNN anchor performed clips of Republican lawmakers describing the Jan. 6 assault “in their own words, on or shortly after that day.”
For instance, now-former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had detailed how rioters overwhelmed legislation enforcement on the Capitol.
“They scaled walls,” McCarthy, then the House minority chief, stated in an audio recording. “They brought ropes. They were scaling the scaffolding. They overtook the place.”
“That was Kevin McCarthy a week after the attack,” Mattingly stated. “He’s currently unemployed, but he was once the House speaker and did more than any other Republican to halt the party’s break from Trump after Jan. 6.”
A separate clip confirmed Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in February 2021, insisting, “You’re not going to get anything but condemnation from me for what happened with those criminals at the Capitol on Jan. 6.”
Mattingly additionally learn aloud a textual content message that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) had despatched in the course of the assault.
“I was just told there’s an active shooter on the first floor of the Capitol,” she wrote to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of employees on the time.
“Please tell the President to calm people,” she added. “This isn’t the way to solve anything.”
McCarthy, Hawley and Greene have since endorsed Trump’s 2024 bid for the White House. But, as Mattingly famous, what that they had every described “was the reality of that day.”
In the years following the riot, Republicans have sought to downplay and whitewash the violence carried out by the mob in search of to overturn the 2020 outcomes.
Trump, the main candidate within the GOP presidential race, faces a federal indictment in connection to his tried coup, in addition to three different felony circumstances. He has pleaded not responsible.
Among Americans figuring out as Republican, the quantity who imagine that Biden’s election victory was reputable has fallen since 2021, in keeping with a ballot launched this week. It additionally discovered that fewer Republicans imagine Jan. 6 was “mostly violent” and that fewer suppose Trump bears duty for the assault.
The Washington Post-University of Maryland ballot additional revealed {that a} quarter of Americans imagine the FBI instigated the riot — a conspiracy idea that some outstanding Republican lawmakers have additionally embraced.
