CNN’s Brianna Keilar had a blunt fact-check for former President Donald Trump after showing a clip of him claiming that no one at the January 6 insurrection had a gun.
Trump made the comment on Tuesday during an economic forum conversation with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Mickelthwaite. The conversation took many turns, including a possible admission by the ex-president that he had spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin since leaving office, but when asked about the peaceful transfer of power after he lost the 2020 election and if he’d accept the results if he lost again, he made a slew of claims that were not true, which Keilar promptly explained:
Trump: We had a term: peacefully and patriotically. These were people — if you think an election is crooked, and I do 100% — if you think, the day it comes when you can’t protest, you take a look at the Democrats. They protested 2016. They’re still protesting it. Nobody talks about them. But if we protest, we want to have honest elections. … People were angry. People went there. And I’ll tell you what, they never show that. The primary scene in Washington was hundreds of thousands, the largest group of people I’ve ever spoken before and I’ve spoken [inaudible]. And it was love and peace.
And some people went to the Capitol. And a lot of strange things happened there, a lot of strange things with people being waved into the Capitol by police with people screaming, “go in” with that, that never got into trouble. You know, I don’t want to mention names, but you know who they are. A lot of strange things happened. But you had a peaceful. Very peaceful. I left. I left the morning that I was supposed to leave. I went to Florida, and you had a very peaceful transfer. This was not a — and I’ll tell you what, those people that did go, that which was a tiny fraction of the people that went to Washington. I mean, you’re talking about a very, very small, because hundreds of thousands of people. And I don’t know what you had five, six, 700 people go down to the Capitol. But those people, that was not, that was, not one of those people had a gun.
Keilar: Actually, they did. Just to be clear. And almost everything he said there is untrue. But we are well aware now of some of the weapons that some of the folks there were carrying that day.
Watch the video above via CNN.