Despite five deaths and hours of video footage showing domestic terrorists using everything from flag poles to baseball bats as weapons, Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson said on a radio show Monday that he doubted an “armed insurrection” happened January 6th.
Raw Story reports that Johnson appeared on The Jay Weber Show broadcast on WISN 1130 AM, a conservative talk radio station in Milwaukee, that the coup attempt would never have been undertaken by Trump supporters, despite evidence that people moved from the Trump speech at the Ellipse to the Capitol; that people waved Trump flags; and that many of those arrested have stated they acted at the instruction of Donald Trump.
“The group of people who supported Trump,” Johnson said, “the hundreds of thousands of people who attend those Trump rallies — those are people that love this country. That never would have done what happened on Jan. 6, which is why I was not concerned, OK? That is a group of people that love freedom. That is a group of people that we need to unify and keep on our side. Listen, I’ve never defended everything Trump does. He’s a New York street fighter. We’re Wisconsin nice. Totally different types of attitude.”
Johnson said he never felt threatened during the attack, adding that he didn’t think it was an armed insurrection because police didn’t confiscate a lot of guns. Johnson didn’t explain why so many insurrectionists were armed with weapons that weren’t guns, nor what one would call bombs planted around Washington.
“The fact of the matter is this didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me,” Johnson said. “Armed, when you hear armed. Don’t you think of firearms. Here’s a question I’d like to have answered: How many firearms were confiscated? How many shots were fired?”
Six weapons were confiscated by police from those arrested on the day of the unrest. Also, police found a cooler filled with Molotov cocktails just outside the Capitol. Video and still photos show many other rioters with guns.
Johnson is also a member of the Republican cabal who wish to excoriate Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (but not then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell), likely from now until the midterm elections, for lax security at the Capitol, saying that he’s contacted the now fired Sergeants-at-Arms of the House and the Senate to find out why they didn’t wants back-up on January 6th. He says he has yet to get a response from them.