Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Saturday offered an alternative reality of the deadly Capitol insurrection earlier this year by falsely claiming a lack of violence on the Senate side during the attack.
Speaking to a group of conservative Wisconsin residents at a local political event on Saturday, Johnson pushed false claims of more activity on the House side of the Capitol when the mob of Trump supporters breached the building, according to CNN.
CNN also reported that Johnson doubled down on his previous assertion of not feeling threatened amid the deadly Capitol insurrection that left five dead.
“One of the reasons I’m being attacked is because I very honestly said I didn’t feel threatened on January 6. I didn’t,” Johnson said, according to CNN. “There was much more violence on the House side. There was no violence on the Senate side, in terms of the chamber.”
Video footage documenting the breaching of the Capitol hours after then-President Trump told his supporters during a rally to “fight like hell” to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory show insurrectionists breaking windows on the Senate side and packing the halls near the Senate chamber. Videos of the Capitol insurrection were aired during Trump’s second impeachment trial last month.
Johnson’s latest attempt to downplay the life-threatening events of the Capitol attack earlier this year comes weeks after he desperately tried to paint the Black Lives Matter movement as violent. In a radio interview on the “Joe Pags Show,” Johnson claimed that he would have felt that he would have felt more threatened if Black Lives Matter protesters breached the Capitol.
Days after his remarks spurred backlash, Johnson boldly insisted that there was “nothing racial” about his suggestion that he would have reason to fear if the Capitol rioters had been associated with the racial justice movement or antifa.
According to CNN, Johnson doubled down on his incendiary comments that demonize the Black Lives Matter movement on Saturday by citing unverified statistics on the nationwide racial justice protests last year amid outcry over police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
“Had the people that rioted in 570 different riots that burned I don’t know how many dozens of buildings in Kenosha, Wisconsin … if those people had shown up in Washington, DC, I said I might have been a little concerned,” Johnson said, according to CNN. “That has now been twisted, contorted into calling me a racist.”
