Nancy Pelosi: ‘Appalling’ That Republicans Deny The Jan. 6 Attack Even Happened
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that it was “quite appalling” to hear House Republicans claim in a recent committee hearing that the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection was just a normal day of tourism at the Capitol.
“Really? Really?” Pelosi said during her weekly press conference. “I don’t know on a normal day around here when people are threatening to hang the vice president of the United States, or shoot the speaker in the forehead, or disrupt and injure so many police officers. I don’t consider that normal. Multiple people were killed.”
The speaker was referring to Republicans’ unbelievable distortions of reality during a Wednesday House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the Capitol attack.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) referred to violent insurrectionists as “peaceful patriots.”
Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) claimed the rioters storming the building who supported President Donald Trump were the ones who lost their lives that day, and that they weren’t the ones taking other people’s lives.
And in a moment of peak gaslighting, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) said there never really was a Capitol insurrection. Instead, it was just “a normal tourist visit.”
In reality, on Jan. 6, President Donald Trump incited his supporters by encouraging them to “fight like hell” to stop lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s win. The mob, goaded by Trump’s lies about election fraud that Republicans in Congress had parroted for months, stormed the Capitol and threatened to kill lawmakers who wouldn’t overturn the election results.
Pelosi said Thursday that reporters needed to watch footage from the hearing if they hadn’t already because they’d have to see it to believe that lawmakers would actually make the claims that they did.
“It was beyond denial,” she said. “It fell into the range of sick.”
House Democrats are currently holding hearings on how to better secure the Capitol and strengthen the police force to prevent another attack. Republicans have responded by downplaying the violence of that day or even defending the rioters behind the insurrection, which led to five deaths, more than 140 police officers injured and more than 440 people being charged, so far, with participating in the attack.
Pelosi drew a link between Republicans’ denial of what happened on Jan. 6 and their censure of one of their own colleagues, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). GOP lawmakers voted Wednesday to throw Cheney out of her leadership post for telling the truth that Biden won the presidential election.
“The denial that they have there, the denial about what happened that day, the denial for the need for more security to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and the denial of finding the truth is what we have to deal with,” she said. “And we will find the truth.”
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