Despite hundreds of people being charged in federal courts with attempting to obstruct an official government proceeding, and several facing or convicted on seditious conspiracy charges, not to mention the more than 1000 charged in connection to the insurrection, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis attempted to revive his 2024 GOP presidential campaign on Friday by insisting the events of January 6, 2021 were not an insurrection.
“It was it was not an insurrection,” DeSantis told media personality Russell Brand.
“These are people that were there to attend a rally and then they were there to protest,” DeSantis, an attorney and former JAG lawyer, added, ignoring at least 95 Dept. of Justice prosecutions that included weapons charges.
“Now it devolved and it devolved into a riot, but the idea that this was a plan to somehow over to overthrow the government of the United States is not true. And it’s something that the media had spun up, just to try to basically, you know, get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and for political aims,” he claimed.
“And so I know there were a lot of people that were there, who were just there, and they didn’t have any designs on doing anything. And so we just have to be honest about it. If somebody is honestly doing an insurrection against the U.S. government, then prove that that’s the case and I’d be happy to accept it, but all you’re showing me is that there were a lot of protesters there. And it ended up evolving, you know, in ways that was unfortunate, of course, but to say that they were auditioning is just wrong.”
Among those who have called the insurrection an insurrection are the U.S. Dept. of Justice and the Chief of the Metropolitan Police Dept. in Washington, D.C.
On the first anniversary of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, DeSantis took the opportunity to also claim it was not an insurrection.
“Calling Jan. 6 equivalent to ‘Christmas’ for ‘D.C.-New York media,’ Gov. Ron DeSantis said on the one-year anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that the day has been used by national media outlets to ‘smear anyone who ever supported Donald Trump,'” the Tampa Bay Times reported.
The paper also published a definition of “insurrection.”
“The crime of insurrection is defined in federal statutes as ‘whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof,’ and can carry penalties of up to 10 years in prison, plus a ban on holding public office. The law was created in reaction to the Civil War and has been ‘largely unused’ in prosecutions throughout American history, according to a report authored by an attorney for the Justice Department’s counterterrorism section,” the paper wrote in 2022.
At the time, the paper also reported, “Florida leads the nation with the highest number of people arrested in connection with the attack, at 76 people, or about 10 percent of the more than 700 people arrested so far.”
Former Republican U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh responded to the Florida governor’s claim, and wrote: “Over 600 people have been convicted so far for trying to obstruct an official government proceeding. They were there to stop the certification of the election. They were there to overthrow the election. It WAS an insurrection. DeSantis is wrong.”
MSNBC’s Medhi Hasan blasted DeSantis on social media.
Florida Politics adds that the governor’s’ remarks “come after DeSantis spent much of Tuesday offering commentary on the siege of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters seeking to stop the certification of President Joe Biden’s election on Jan. 6, 2021.”
“During a CNN interview with Jake Tapper, Ron DeSantis said it was time to move on past the 2020 election and the aftermath, with the former President reportedly being a ‘criminal target’ for the Jan. 6 riot.”