Donald Trump leaned into fiction on Saturday evening as he blamed Joe Biden for events that happened while Trump was still president and angrily insisted that the FBI was in on a conspiracy to make his followers look bad on January 6, 2021.
The president’s allies in Congress have often been dinged by the press for erroneously attacking the Biden administration for events that transpired in 2020 and the start of 2021, such as Sen. Jim Banks — who just last week wrongly insisted that the 2020 U.S. Census was “prepared by the Biden administration”. Other Republicans, in their zeal to attack Democrats and support calls for a new census, have similarly forgotten who was president that year.
But now Trump himself is doing it. In a Truth Social post Saturday evening, he claimed in all-caps that “the Biden FBI” supposedly “placed 274 agents into the crowd on January 6”.
“What a SCAM – DO SOMETHING!!! President DJT”, the post concluded.
Obviously, the “Biden FBI” did not exist on January 6, nor did it exist in any of the weeks or months leading up to the attack on the Capitol, when dozens of police officers were injured responding to a violent mob numbering in the thousands as rioters stormed barricades, shattered windows, defaced the hallways of the Capitol complex and battled with law enforcement around the grounds.
The “Biden FBI” began to take shape later that month, after President Joe Biden was sworn in on January 20, 2021.
Donald Trump was president on January 6, and the FBI reported to him that day — as did the D.C. National Guard. Trump himself was among the slowest to respond to the attack on the Capitol; a breadth of reporting indicates that the Republican president was watching TV during the attack (after being told by Secret Service he could not attend in person).
Several hours elapsed between the time that violence broke out at the U.S. Capitol and the president released a statement urging his followers to depart peacefully.
The accusation that the FBI was involved in stirring up violence and disorder that day has been alleged for years by the president’s supporters, many of whom have long defended the presence of pro-Trump demonstrators at the Capitol to pressure Congress into overturning the 2020 election.
FBI officials and investigators with the bipartisan congressional January 6 investigation said there was no truth to those accusations, and Trump’s own current FBI director, Kash Patel, has also refused to back up that conspiratorial claim.
Patel was forced to clarify the agency’s position on its deployment of agents on January 6 in late September, the first time Trump used his Truth Social platform to amplify this conspiracy by writing that FBI agents were “probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists” in the crowd. The FBI director responded in an interview, saying that the deployment occurred after the riot began.
Patel told Fox News Digital: “Agents were sent into a crowd control mission after the riot was declared by Metro Police – something that goes against FBI standards.
“This was the failure of a corrupt leadership that lied to Congress and to the American people about what really happened.”
He added: “Thanks to agents coming forward, we are now uncovering the truth. We are fully committed to transparency, and justice and accountability continues with this FBI.”
But his explanation didn’t satisfy Trump, who remains fixated on the alleged role of FBI agents in provoking his supporters to the violence many of them expressed their own intentions to carry out, on camera, in police bodycam footage recovered after the attack. On Truth Social last week, the president fumed that he wanted to know “who each and every one of these so-called ‘Agents’ are, and what they were up to on that now ‘Historic’ Day.’”
In the days after coming to office in January, the president moved to commute the sentences of hundreds of participants in the attack — many of whom were convicted of violent offenses against members of law enforcement. He has at the same time portrayed his politican enemies as violent criminals, instigating crackdowns on cities including Washington D.C., Chicago and Memphis.
The DOJ separately confirmed last year that around two dozen persons who worked with the agency as confidential informants attended January 6, though most did not inform the agency beforehand and none were deployed by the bureau to the scene.
In the month before he was sworn into office for a second time, Trump insisted that members of Congress who participated in the bipartisan investigation into January 6 should be jailed, though he didn’t both accusing them of committing a crime — merely standing up to him. In recent weeks his DOJ has, at his direction, begun prosecutions of his political enemies including New York state’s attorney general, Letitia James.
