Mike Pence has denounced the debunked conspiracy theory that the FBI instigated the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
As recently as this weekend Donald Trump has continued to spread the baseless theory that Antifa and the FBI were behind the attack on Congress rather than his own supporters.
Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union on Sunday morning from Tel Aviv — just one day after the third anniversary of the attack — former Vice President Pence said: “We’ve been assured again and again that it was not the case.”
“I just must tell you, having been there that day, to see people literally breaking windows, ransacking the Capitol, it just infuriated me. I remember thinking ’not this, not here, not at the United States Capitol,’” he said.
Mr Pence added he is “very grateful” for the efforts of the FBI’s efforts to arrest those who “ransacked our Capitol and did violence against police officers that day,” demanding those who participated in the attack be held to “the fullest extent of the law”.
The attack, he said, “should never have happened. As I’ve said many times before, the former president’s words that day were reckless. I believe history will judge his role in that.”
Former Vice President Pence was in Israel to show support for Israel’s war against Hamas. He also spoke about the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza, the secrecy surrounding the hospitalisation of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and his hopes that Iowa voters give Republicans a “fresh start” when they caucus on 15 January.
Mr Trump continues to try and reframe the violence that occurred at the Capitol in early 2021 as he campaigns for reelection ahead of the Iowa caucuses.
“By the way, there was Antifa, there was FBI, there were a lot of other people there too leading the charge,” Mr Trump said at a rally in Sioux, Center Iowa on Friday, 5 January. “You saw the same people that I did.”
Mr Trump also said at the campaign event that he believed the audience on 6 January 2021 was the “biggest crowd, I believe, I ever spoke to—you never hear about that do you?”
He then turned to “the hostages,” his term for those arrested and charged for their actions on January 6. “The J6 hostages, I call them. Nobody’s been treated ever in history so badly as those people,” he said.
Their imprisonment, Mr Trump said, will go down as “one of the saddest things in the history of our country. And they went there to protest a rigged election.”
Democratic Rep Jamie Raskin also spoke about the debunked conspiracy in an appearance on Inside with Jen Psaki on MSNBC on Sunday morning noting that if the hundreds of people who had been arrested in connection with the riot were indeed the FBI and Antifa, why would Mr Trump want to pardon them?
The Justice Department reported since the 2021 riot, over 1,200 individuals have been charged with crimes connected to the Capitol attack, while more than 700 people have pleaded guilty to various federal charges.
Saturday marked three years since the violent attack on the Capitol building, which led to the deaths of four rioters and five police officers and left many more injured.
Mr Trump’s false claims about the Capitol riot and 2020 election fraud come as he faces charges at the federal level and separately in Georgia regarding his alleged efforts to overturn the presidential election.
In its final report in 2022, the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack also named Mr Trump as the “central cause” of the riot “whom many others followed.”
