At a White House event on Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump continued his efforts to rewrite the story of Jan. 6, boasting about the size of his crowd at the Ellipse and claiming “there was so much love” among the election deniers he summoned. But the president’s rhetoric about his attack on the Capitol was even more notable hours earlier.
On Wednesday morning, The New York Post’s Miranda Devine released her latest podcast interview with Trump in which he pretended that rioters were actually victims — not just of the criminal justice system, but of a nefarious FBI plot.
The insurrectionists, the president said, “lost their lives over nonsense where the FBI said, ‘Go in, go in!’”
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time. In fact, it was last fall when Trump claimed by way of his social media platform, “THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6.” To no one in particular, he concluded, “DO SOMETHING!!!”
Left unsaid was that Biden was a private citizen at the time: On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump was still president, the bureau was still led by Trump’s handpicked FBI director, and there was no such thing as “the Biden FBI.”
The president might take some comfort in knowing he’s not the only one who’s deeply confused about all of this. For far too long, a wide variety of Republican conspiracy theorists have clung to the ridiculous idea that federal law enforcement secretly instigated the insurrectionist assault on the Capitol. The absurd claims grew so common that they were given a name: the “fedsurrection” narrative.
The theory has long been preposterous, and in late 2024, it was definitely discredited when the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, unveiled the detailed findings of a four-year investigation that concluded that while there were FBI informants at the Capitol, no FBI officials were responsible for instigating the attack.