WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 03: Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI) holds up a redacted document during a hearing about the Crossfire Hurricane investigation in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on December 03, 2020 in Washington, DC. Crossfire Hurricane is the code name for the FBI's 2016 counterintelligence investigation into possible links between President Donald Trump's associates and Russian officials. A Justice Department Inspector General report found no political bias in the initiation of the investigation, which resulted in the Mueller Report finding that the Trump campaign did not conspire or coordinate with the Russian government. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) said Monday that the Capitol riots, which left seven people dead on Capitol Hill on January 6, didn’t seem like an “armed insurrection.”
Johnson talked extensively about the Capitol insurrection on Wisconsin talk radio station 1130 WISN with Jay Weber. “The group of people that supported Trump, the hundreds of thousands of people who attended those Trump rallies, those are the people that love this country,” Johnson told Weber. “They never would have done what happened on Jan. 6. That is a group of people that love freedom; that’s a group of people we need to unify and keep on our side.”
The senator then said that the events “didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me.”
“When you hear the word ‘armed,’ don’t you think of firearms? Here’s the questions I would have liked to ask – how many firearms were confiscated? How many shots were fired? I’m only aware of one, and I’ll defend that law enforcement officer for taking that shot, it was a tragedy, but I think there was only one. If that was a planned armed insurrection, man, you had really a bunch of idiots,” Johnson said.
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Johnson also criticized the videos presented by the House prosecutors during former President Donald Trump‘s second impeachment trial. Johnson called the footage “highly selectively edited.” The footage Johnson is referencing showed Sen. Mitt Romney having a close encounter with rioters.
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