Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) declared falsely that former President Donald Trump “did nothing” to stop the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol as we came “perilously close to losing our democracy.”
“Let me say that what we have been able to ascertain is that we came perilously close to losing our democracy as we come to learn it [sic],” Thompson said. “Had those insurrectionists been successful, we are not certain what we would have had, had it not been for the brave men and women who protected the Capitol in spite of being woefully outnumbered.”
False. There was no insurrection. There was FBI-instigated chaos at the Capitol designed to entrap unarmed, unorganized Trump protesters who had been guided into the Capitol by police. The only fatal violence inflicted was by the “the brave men and women who protected the Capitol,” who fired on an unarmed woman and killed her. Other protesters were beaten by baton-wielding police. There is video evidence of every stage of this entrapment.
The liar Thompson added, with full complicity from the CNN host, “The harm that I see is the president of the United States seeing the Capitol of the United States under siege by people he sent to the Capitol and did nothing during that time. Something’s wrong with that. So we need to find out who was calling, who was texting, who was emailing during those 187 minutes to see whether or not that information will let us know if people were part of the problem.”
Fact check: Trump urged the protesters to go home peacefully. He had no power to stop what happened at the Capitol, the chaos of which was entirely by the design of the Trump-hating Deep State.