Trump to address nation on anniversary of Jan 6 calling riot an ‘unarmed protest’

Insurrection led to five deaths and injuries to 140 law enforcement officers

Donald Trump has announced that he plans to address the nation on the anniversary of the 6 January Capitol riot, calling the violent siege on Congress an “unarmed protest”.

“Why isn’t the Unselect Committee of highly partisan political hacks investigating the CAUSE of the January 6th protest, which was the rigged Presidential Election of 2020?” the former president said in a statement on Tuesday, again pushing the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

The Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council said in a joint statement on 12 November 2020: “The November third election was the most secure in American history.”

“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” they added.

One of two Republican members on the House Select Committee investigating the riot, Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger, was asked on Sunday if he thought it was possible that some of his Republican colleagues bear direct responsibility for the riot.

“It’s possible,” Mr Kinzinger told ABC News. “I’m not ready to kind of go to that point yet, because I want to let the facts dictate it.”

“Does anybody notice that they want to stay as far away from that topic as possible, the numbers don’t work for them, or even come close,” Mr Trump added in his statement. “The only thing they can do is not talk about it.”

“Look at what is going on now in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, and, to a lesser extent, Michigan where the numbers are horrendously corrupt in Detroit, but the weak Republican RINOs in the Michigan House and Senate don’t want to touch the subject,” he said.

RINO stands for Republican In Name Only and is a derogatory phrase applied to Republican officials that other conservatives may believe have fallen short of their ideals or are faltering in their loyalty to the party.

President Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia has been reaffirmed three times, and a review in Arizona pushed by Republicans has been widely panned for being badly administered.

“In more than a decade working on elections, audits and recounts across the country, I’ve never seen one this mismanaged,” Jennifer Morrell, a former election official and expert on post-election audits, wrote for The Washington Post in May of this year.

There is no evidence that any kind of fraud changed the outcome of the election.

“In many ways, a RINO is worse than a Radical Left Democrat, because you don’t know where they are coming from and you have no idea how bad they really are for our Country,” Mr Trump added. “The good news is there are fewer and fewer RINOs left as we elect strong Patriots who love America.”

“I will be having a news conference on January 6th at Mar-a-Lago to discuss all of these points, and more,” he said.

“Until then, remember, the insurrection took place on November 3rd, it was the completely unarmed protest of the rigged election that took place on January 6th,” he added.

Robert S Palmer is pictured throwing a fire extinguisher at police during the 6 January, 2021, riot at the US Capitol. (US District Court)

Charges against the more than 700 rioters who have been prosecuted so far reveal that they used a wide variety of weapons, including stun guns, pepper spray, baseball bats and flagpoles used as clubs. A suspect also placed pipe bombs at the DC headquarters of the Democratic and Republican parties.

Police with guns drawn face off against rioters trying to break into the House Chamber at the US Capitol (Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

The acting chief of the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department said in January: “I’ve talked to officers who have done two tours in Iraq who said this was scarier to them than their time in combat.”

Rioters try to break through a police barrier at the Capitol in Washington, on Jan 6, 2021 (Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

“This was a pretty heavily armed crew of people compared to what you usually see at protests,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told NPR in March. “Even when you see people who are armed at protests in states, for example, where they have open-carry laws, they aren’t storming into a building using the weapons in the way that we saw at the Capitol.”

Trump supporters scale the walls of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 (AP)

The attack on Congress led to the deaths of five people and around 140 law enforcement officers were injured.