Donald Trump wanted to march on the U.S. Capitol with his supporters on January 6 last year but was stopped by his Secret Service...
Donald Trump wanted to march on the U.S. Capitol with his supporters on January 6 last year but was stopped by his Secret Service, the former president claimed in an interview published Thursday.
He shrugged off the furor surrounding the seven-hour gap in White House phone logs that day, which includes the deadly hours during which rioters breached the Capitol.
'Secret Service said I couldn’t go. I would have gone there in a minute,' Trump told the Washington Post in an interview at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
The former president once again took aim at lawmakers investigating what led to the events of January 6, claiming he offered to shield her with 'privilege' -- which other reports indicate she did not invoke.
The eight-hour interview between Ivanka Trump and the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol was 'shame and harassment,' Trump claimed.
He also denied suggestions that he destroyed call logs or used burner phones in the hours between 11:17 a.m. and 6:54 p.m., and did not say who he spoke with during that period aside from Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
'From the standpoint of telephone calls, I don’t remember getting very many,' Trump said.
'Why would I care about who called me? If congressmen were calling me, what difference did it make? There was nothing secretive about it. There was no secret.'
The former president described his daughter's marathon grilling before the January 6 committee as 'shame and harassment'
The former president previously denied even knowing what a 'burner phone' is, though late last month his former National Security Adviser John Bolton claimed he heard his ex-boss use the term multiple times.
He even touted the 'tremendous' crowd size at his White House Stop the Steal rally before the riot took place, praising its organizers -- despite federal charges looming over some who planned the day.
'The crowd was far bigger than I even thought. I believe it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to. I don’t know what that means, but you see very few pictures. They don’t want to show pictures, the fake news doesn’t want to show pictures,' Trump said.
While the exact number of how many people heard Trump speak at the Ellipse is unknown, the Justice Department has charged at least 800 people in connection with the insurrection.
Trump denied regretting encouraging people to descend on Washington that day, nor did he admit to charging up the crowd with inflammatory speech.
'I said peaceful and patriotic,' he pointed out, without reportedly mentioning his other remarks.
Trump said the crowd of people who heard him speak ahead of the Capitol riot was 'the largest crowd' he ever spoke to
He also heaped praise on conservative activist Virginia Thomas, who admitted last month in a Washington Free Beacon interview that she was at the ex-president's Stop the Steal rally but left before he took the stage.
Virginia Thomas is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who cast the lone dissenting vote when the high court ruled Trump must hand over records linked to the insurrection to the Capitol riot committee.
Reports indicate that Virginia Thomas was highly influential in shaping the former president's thinking, at least for a time.
The Democrat-led panel is reportedly in possession of more than two dozen text messages between her and then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, many of which involve her peddling false QAnon conspiracy theories and pushing for ways to overturn President Joe Biden's 2020 victory.
Trump told the Post he did not know about those efforts, though he admitted to talking to her when he was in the White House.
'First of all, her husband is a great justice. And she’s a fine woman. And she loves our country,' the ex-president said in the Thursday interview.
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