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Right-wing political commentator Dinesh D'Souza suggested Friday that former President Donald Trump was "ambivalent" about the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot because he supported the mob's reason for storming the Capitol.
"Trump seems to have been ambivalent about January 6, because he knew the cause of the protesters was right, but he did not ask them to, nor approve of them going inside the Capitol. The #January6Committee thinks his conduct is a 'smoking gun,' but they're just blowing smoke," D'Souza wrote in a Truth Social post, referring to the House committee investigating the riot.
D'Souza is behind the 2020 election documentary 2,000 Mules, which claims to unveil evidence of widespread voter fraud. Fact checkers at the Associated Press, PolitiFact and Reuters have ruled allegations in the film as misleading, flawed or lacking concrete evidence, but it has earned Trump's support. The former president screened it at his Mar-a-Lago resort in May with figures like Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell in attendance.
D'Souza's suggestion that Trump was "ambivalent" about the events on January 6, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to halt the certification of President Joe Biden's 2020 election victory, came on the heels of the House committee's eighth public hearing to present evidence that it says show a coordinated effort to overturn the results of the contentious vote. Some of the key takeaways from the hearing on Thursday included that Trump allegedly knew his supporters were storming the Capitol 15 minutes after he finished his Ellipse speech telling them to "fight like hell," and spent most of the 187 minutes after the speech watching the violence unfold on television in the White House dining room while refusing to heed calls from his advisers to tell the mob to stop.
While D'Souza remarked in his Truth Social post Friday that Trump did not ask for or approve of the rioters going into the Capitol, the House panel alleged Thursday that he deliberately chose not to act that day.
The panel suggested that he only decided to release a video on January 6 telling the rioters to go home after realizing that their attempts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power had failed and his inaction during the attack could be a dereliction of duty and violation of his oath of office.
In the video that Trump released that day, he reiterated his unproven claims of election fraud and called the rioters "very special."
"This was a fraudulent election, but we can't play into the hands of these people," Trump said in the video. "We have to have peace. So go home. We love you; you're very special."
Newsweek reached out to D'Souza and a Trump spokesperson for comment.
About the writer
Zoe Strozewski is a Newsweek reporter based in New Jersey. Her focus is reporting on U.S. and global politics. Zoe ... Read more