Trump deflects blame for silence on Jan. 6 and says he would have gone to the Capitol ‘in
The 45th president has repeatedly deflected blame for stoking the attack with false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and in the interview, he struck a defiant posture, refusing to say whether he would testify before a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault. Trump said he didn’t remember “getting very many” phone calls that day, and he denied removing call logs or using burner phones.
Trump also said he had spoken during his presidency with Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. A seven-hour gap in Trump’s phone records on Jan. 6, and Thomas’s texts to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows urging the White House to fight the election results, have both come under scrutiny by the Jan. 6 committee.
During the attack, Trump watched television, criticized then-Vice President Mike Pence and made calls pushing lawmakers to overturn the election as the violent mob of his supporters ransacked the Capitol. He was eventually persuaded by lawmakers, family members and others to release a video asking his supporters to go home — 187 minutes after he urged them to march to the Capitol during a rally near the White House. He was described by advisers as excited about the event.
Trump, speaking Wednesday afternoon at his palatial beachfront club, said he did not regret urging the crowd to come to Washington with a tweet stating that it would “be wild!” He also stood by his incendiary and false rhetoric about the election at the Ellipse rally before the rioters stormed the Capitol. “I said peaceful and patriotic,” he said, omitting other comments that he made in a speech that day.
In fact, Trump said he deserved more credit for drawing such a large crowd to the Ellipse — and that he pressed to march on the Capitol with his supporters but was stopped by his security detail. “Secret Service said I couldn’t go. I would have gone there in a minute,” he said.
The former president praised organizers of the rally, some of whom have now received subpoenas from federal authorities, and repeatedly bragged about the size of the crowd on the Ellipse, when questioned about the events of Jan. 6.
“The crowd was far bigger than I even thought. I believe it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to. I don’t know what that means, but you see very few pictures. They don’t want to show pictures, the fake news doesn’t want to show pictures,” he said. “But this was a tremendous crowd.”
On at least a dozen occasions in the interview, Trump blamed Pelosi for the events of Jan. 6. On that day, Pelosi was taken to a secure location and worked with some of Trump’s top military officials and others to help secure the building. Trump supporters stormed her office and vowed to hurt her, with some shouting for her by name.
Pelosi does not have total control over the Capitol Police, as Trump alleged, but shares control of the Capitol with the Senate majority leader. Most decisions on securing the Capitol are made by a police board. He also blamed the D.C. mayor, whose advisers furiously tried to reach Trump’s team that day.
“The former president’s desperate lies aside, the speaker was no more in charge of the security of the U.S. Capitol that day than Mitch McConnell,” said Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi.
Trump said he had not been contacted by the Jan. 6 committee and added that he didn’t know what he would do if he were. “It depends what the request is,” he said. He has repeatedly invoked executive privilege in a bid to block the committee from seeing documents.
He said the committee’s interview with his daughter Ivanka Trump for eight hours this week was a “shame and harassment,” though he insisted he did not know what she had told the members. He said he also did not know what her husband, Jared Kushner, had told the committee, and that he had offered the couple “privilege” if they wanted it. They declined, Trump said.
Trump said he had not destroyed any call logs from the afternoon of Jan. 6 and took part in no phone calls on “burner phones,” even though there is a large gap in his White House phone logs. Trump said that he remembered talking to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other people during that period. He said he had a “very good” memory but could not say exactly who he talked to that afternoon, or when.
“From the standpoint of telephone calls, I don’t remember getting very many,” he said, later adding, “Why would I care about who called me? If congressmen were calling me, what difference did it make? There was nothing secretive about it. There was no secret.”
Trump said he had talked at times during his presidency with Ginni Thomas, whose texts with Meadows urging him to overturn the election were obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News. But Trump said he wasn’t aware of her electoral efforts. He declined to say whether he thought Meadows should have handed over the text messages to the Jan. 6 committee.
“First of all, her husband is a great justice. And she’s a fine woman. And she loves our country,” he said.
Trump emerged Wednesday in his ornate and gilded Mar-a-Lago living room with the sun beaming into the couches alongside two advisers — Susie Wiles, who occasionally suggested it was time for the interview to end, and David Bossie, whose family stood nearby. After he asked four times, loud music piping into the ballroom was turned down. He wore a blazer with no tie and carried a Diet Coke as he sat near a toy Air Force One.
He meandered during the interview and stonewalled questions with long answers. He appeared to be in a good mood, aside from when he faced a series of questions about Jan. 6.
At one point, Trump was greeted by Scott Atlas, his White House coronavirus adviser who clashed with the medical community. Atlas strolled in from the patio to see him on the couch.
“Doc!” Trump said, before complimenting Atlas on losing weight. “Look who we have here!”
“This is the center of the universe,” he said, shortly after Atlas walked away. “Come back later,” he hollered after him.
Trump also delved into foreign policy, lashing into NATO for not doing more to help Ukraine — Trump has repeatedly lampooned the organization — and said he’d threatened NATO leaders during a 2018 meeting in Brussels, a notion his advisers denied vigorously at the time.
“A lot of people are a little bit surprised, I think they’re very impressed with Ukraine, but they’re not impressed with what NATO is doing, because a lot of people think NATO could be doing more,” Trump said, speaking in general terms.
When asked whether he had changed his mind on Ukraine, a country he regularly criticized as president, he began speaking about his impeachment trial that was launched after he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden’s son Hunter Biden and find an email server.
“I liked Zelensky from the beginning for one reason. When we had the impeachment hoax, based on a perfect phone call, he totally backed me up, and I didn’t ask him to do that. They asked him, and he said, he absolutely did nothing wrong,” Trump said. “He said there was no quid pro quo. He didn’t even know what his people were talking about. He thought they were crazy. … So I gained great respect for him there.”
Trump offered few ideas for what he would do to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. He said he thought Russian President Vladimir Putin was a savvy negotiator for sending troops to the Ukrainian border but thought he “overplayed his hand” by invading the country.
Some top Republicans have distanced themselves from Trump’s continued praise of Putin. Trump said he had not spoken to Putin since leaving office.
“Now, it’s a hard situation. What they should do is lower the price of oil. Because you need money to fight wars. At $150 a barrel and going up to more, you look at it, it’s going up to numbers that nobody has ever…
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