A crowd that included many armed people attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A_
In an extraordinary monologue Tuesday at a Univision town hall, Donald Trump repeated the lie that the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6—which he described using the pronoun “we”—was unarmed.
“There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns,” Trump said. “That was a day of love.”
That is a lie. The latest evidence showing that Trump’s claim is false came in a guilty plea Wednesday by a Texas man named Roger Preacher. Preacher admitted to carrying a pistol on the grounds of the Capitol on January 6, though he knew that doing so was illegal.
Preacher said that he traveled to Washington with two other men who also brought “pistols and AR-style” rifles on the trip. They drove into Washington on January 6 from a Virginia hotel room with three rifles in a bag, the filing says. They left the bag in the car, but Preacher carried his pistol in “an inside-the-waistband holster “ to the lower West Terrace of the Capitol grounds where he remained for around an hour. Preacher said he believed the other two men “were also carrying firearms on their persons.”
Preacher’s admission adds to the heap of evidence that many people in the crowd outside the Capitol on January 6 had guns. Mother Jones compiled evidence of the many guns among January 6 perpetrators back in 2021, in a report based on public video footage, congressional testimony, and criminal cases.
Because police officers made few arrests on January 6 itself to limit violence, few of the attackers were caught with firearms on them. This has allowed the myth pushed by Trump and his allies that the crowd was unarmed to spread. But numerous cases since have revealed that some rioters carried weapons or, like members of the Oath Keepers militia, stashed arms nearby.
The House January 6 committee’s final report, released in 2022, cited police reports indicating that DC officers spotted numerous people descending on the National Mall that day who appeared to be carrying guns. Police stopped few of them, presumably because they feared being shot.
The committee’s report notes that many Trump supporters who arrived for his speech at the Ellipse that day were armed, and that White House officials, including Trump, knew that.
In testimony to the House committee detailed in its final report, Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as a top aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, said that Trump berated a top Secret Service official on January 6 because agents had placed magnetometers around the Ellipse, deterring some of his gun-toting fans from attending. “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons,” Trump said, according to Hutchinson. “They’re not here to hurt me.”
Preacher is one of around 1,500 people charged with crimes related to January 6, among them Trump himself. Special Counsel Jack Smith wrote in a filing on Tuesday that Trump was responsible for the attack. The former president, the filing said, “willfully caused his supporters to obstruct and attempt to obstruct the proceeding by summoning them to Washington, D.C.”
