WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden marked the anniversary of the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol with a speech Thursday that took sharp aim at former President Donald Trump’s involvement in the riot and warned of the ongoing threats to democracy.
Speaking from the Capitol building, Biden delivered a sharp rebuke of Trump and his supporters who attacked the complex last year, debunking the lies that the former president and other Republicans have spread about the 2020 election, while refraining from calling out his predecessor directly by name,
“We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie,” Biden said. “A former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He’s done so because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interest as more important than his country’s interest and America’s interest.”
“He can’t accept he lost,” Biden continued.
Biden, who has repeatedly said that Jan. 6 was one of the darkest days in U.S. history, had been reluctant to criticize his predecessor by name even as Trump and other Republicans continue to convey lies about the validity of the 2020 election results.
Ahead of Biden’s speech, Psaki said that he was “clear-eyed about the threat the former president represents to our democracy and how the former president constantly works to undermine basic American values and rule of law.”
“He [Biden] sees January 6th as a tragic culmination of what those four years under President Trump did to our country,” she added.
Biden did not use the speech to focus on voting rights, as some Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, had encouraged the White House to do. Some Biden allies had argued for keeping the two issues separate, saying that voting rights is about stopping the disenfranchisement of voters of color while Jan. 6 is about a violent attempt to upend the country’s democratic election process.
The president will give a separate speech on voting rights legislation on Tuesday in Atlanta.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has scheduled a series of events following the president’s speech to mark the anniversary of the day thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a failed attempt to stop lawmakers from certifying Biden’s victory in the presidential election. Some House members will share their personal accounts of the attack and historians will hold a discussion on the “historic perspective” of Jan. 6.
Psaki said that Biden was “very personally involved” in crafting his speech and that last year’s events “hit him personally.” She added that the “silence and complacency” of some Republicans in the time since the attack “has stuck” with Biden.
Trump had been planning to host a news conference Thursday for the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack, but abruptly canceled it on Tuesday, blaming the House select committee investigating the riot.
A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll released Saturday found that 60 percent of Americans said Trump bears either a “great deal” or a “good amount” of responsibility for the attack.
The poll, however, found that Americans’ views were deeply split along partisan lines, with 72 percent of Republicans and 83 percent of Trump voters saying the former president bears “just some” responsibility or “none at all.”
More than 700 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the Capitol riot and the House committee has interviewed a number of people close to Trump. The committee is expected to release a report on its findings before the 2022 midterm elections, when Republicans could win control of Congress and shut down that investigation.
This report was originally published in NBC News.
