“I have nothing to hide, I wasn’t involved” – Trump speaks on Jan. 6 Capitol riot

Former President Donald Trump claimed Friday night that his speech on Jan. 6 before the Capitol insurrection was “extremely calming.”

“Honestly, I have nothing to hide,” Trump told Fox News Laura Ingraham, discussing a House select committee’s ongoing investigation of the insurrection.

“I wasn’t involved in that,” he said, apparently referring to his supporters storming the Capitol after his speech. “And if you look at my words and what I said in the speech, they were extremely calming, actually.”

Trump maintained his claim that the Capitol insurrection was just a “protest.”

“The insurrection took place on Nov. 3, which was Election Day,” Trump said. “This was a protest, and a lot of innocent people are being hurt. A lot of innocent people are being injured.”

He said “The panel of judges that we are talking about didn’t exactly link trump, and if you look at the appointment you can figure that one out for yourself”.

“This was a absolute protest and people are being treated very, very unfairly,” he added. “Their rights are being taken away from them, and the other side is not. You take a look at what’s going on with BLM and Antifa, what they did in Portland and Minneapolis and Seattle, and nothing happens, and by the way people were killed. Nobody was killed here other than Ashli Babbitt, who was shot violently by a man who should not have ever been allowed to pull that trigger.”

However, The select House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot on Friday said it issued subpoenas for testimony and records to two former aides to ex-President Donald Trump, who met with him two days before the attack, and to four other people. CNBC reported.

The aides, Robert “Bobby” Peede Jr., and Max Miller, met with Trump “in his private dining room off the Oval Office” on Jan. 4 to discuss speakers and other aspects of a rally Trump appeared at on the Ellipse outside of the White House on Jan. 6, the committee said.

Trump’s rally that day was wrapping up as a mob of his supporters invaded the grounds of the Capitol, and ultimately breached its walls, disrupting a joint session of Congress that was confirming the Electoral College victory of President Joe Biden.

At the gathering, Trump asked supporters to fight against Biden’s victory being confirmed. The then-president claimed erroneously that he had been the victim of extensive ballot fraud in numerous swing states.

Another witness subject to the new subpoenas, Brian Jack, served as Trump’s political affairs director, “and reportedly reached out to several Members of Congress on behalf of the former President to ask them to speak at the Ellipse on January 6th,” the House committee said in a news release.

Also subpoenaed were Bryan Lewis, Ed Martin and Kimberly Fletcher.

Lewis obtained a permit for a rally outside the Capitol that day to urge Congress “to nullify electoral votes from states that made illegal changes to voting rules during their elections,” the committee said.

Martin “was an organizer of the Stop the Steal movement and was involved in the planning and financing the Stop the Steal protest on January 6th that directly preceded the attack on the Capitol,” according to the panel.

Fletcher and her group Moms for America, helped organize a Jan. 5 rally in Washington and the Jan. 6 Ellipse rally to support Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who heads the probe, said in a statement, “The Select Committee expects these witnesses to join the hundreds of individuals who have already cooperated with our investigation as we work to provide the American people with answers about what happened on January 6th and ensure nothing like that day ever happens again.”