Karoline Leavitt defends White House Jan 6 website after being set up by journalist ranting about MAGA conspiracy theories
Five years after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol as part of the Republican’s attempts to undermine the election results, the Trump administration released a website blaming Democrats and police for the violence
The White House continues to defend a highly inaccurate website it made marking five years since Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“We knew the media would be covering January 6th quite a bit because they think it's something the American people are still believing their lies on,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a press briefing on Wednesday. “They think it’s something that still helps their case against this president. Obviously not, or else he wouldn’t have been reelected in an overwhelming fashion in November of last year.”
Her comments were in response to a lengthy question from reporter Cara Castronuova, a correspondent for Trump ally Mike Lindell’s LindellTV.
Castronuova claimed that Democrats and the mainstream media have pushed a “big lie” that the January 6 riot was an insurrection and that police died that day. (Media outlets including The Independent have accurately reported that officers involved in responding to the riot died after January 6 itself.)
In addition, she claimed a Georgia woman named Rosanne Boyland was “pepper balled, gassed, and ultimately brutally beaten with a stick” by a Capitol police officer.
The January 6 riot followed months of pressure from Trump who continued to falsely claim the 2020 election had been stolen and pressed officials to “find” him more votes.
On January 6 itself, the president publicly pushed his Vice President Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role in the election certification process to pause the final approval of Joe Biden’s win in an attempt to send the results back to states, where Trump allies were also pushing to create slates of “false electors” who would swing the Electoral College results to the Republican.
During the riot, Trump supporters chanted they wanted to “hang Mike Pence.”
Former Special Counsel Jack Smith recently testified his office was confident it would’ve been able to convict Trump of a conspiracy to overturn the election results, culminating in January 6, had the president not won reelection and been barred from prosecution under DOJ guidelines.
Boyland’s official cause of death was ruled to be acute amphetamine intoxication, thought to be linked to a valid medical prescription.
Individuals present with the 34-year-old Trump supporter on January 6 have offered differing accounts of how she died.
Justin Cave, her brother-in-law, said Boyland was trampled in a crowd battling with police in a hallway into the Capitol, a conclusion The New York Times reached in a video analysis of the death.
Others have said police were directly responsible for her death, and the claim has circulated across right-wing media. A Newsweek fact-check found one video referenced by supporters of this theory is misleadingly edited.
The Independent has contacted the U.S. Capitol Police for comment.
The White House website about January 6 is filled with inaccurate and highly partisan information about the riot.
It calls the nearly 1,600 people prosecuted for their involvement, many of whom were later pardoned by Donald Trump, “patriotic Americans” who were “peaceful protesters treated as insurrectionists by a weaponized Biden DOJ.”
The White House also flatly denied any involvement from Trump in the day’s event, or that it was meant to “overthrow the government.”
Elsewhere, the website refers to Pence’s decision to allow the “stolen election” to continue as a “betrayal of the president” and an act of “cowardice and sabotage.”
The site also claims a 55-year-old Alabama man who died of a heart attack during January 6 was killed.
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