Former President Donald Trump said he considered heading down to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 only for the Secret Service to pull the brakes on the idea, according to audio aired by CNN on Thursday.
Trump, in a March 2021 interview with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, falsely claimed that he spoke to his biggest crowd “by far” at his “Save America Rally” before discussing the rejected intervention plan.
“You told them you were going to go up to the Capitol. Were you just –,” Karl said.
“No, I was going to and then Secret Service said you can’t and then by the time – I would have and then when I get back I saw – I wanted to go back. I was thinking about going back during the problem to stop the problem, doing it myself,” said Trump, who told his supporters to go to the Capitol.
“Secret Service didn’t like that idea too much.”
Trump’s claims arrive after accounts that he tried to head to the Capitol, an attempt that included an alleged physical altercation between him and Secret Service agents where he tried to grab the wheel of his presidential limousine following the rally.
“I’m the f-ing president. Take me up to the Capitol now,” said Trump, according to Jan. 6 committee testimony from ex-White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson.
Hutchinson also told the committee in a recorded testimony that Trump was angry over Secret Service magnetometers arranged to keep armed supporters from the rally site.
Trump, who wound up in the White House at the time of the attack, did nothing to quell the violence for 187 minutes and instead caught up on TV coverage of the insurrection following his speech.
Trump, later in the interview, said he could’ve gone down to the Capitol as he would’ve been “very well received.”
“Don’t forget, the people that went to Washington that day, in my opinion, they went because they thought the election was rigged. That’s why they went,” he said.
The audio – reportedly recorded just months after the Jan. 6 attack – stems from the former president’s interview with Karl, whose book “Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party” dropped earlier this week.
Karl’s book revealed that an ex-senior Trump official criticized the former president, calling him a “traitor” as well as a “clear and present danger.”
It also found Trump believed a dangerous conspiracy theory that claimed he’d be “reinstated” as president in the months after his first term in office, a theory that his former lawyer Jenna Ellis dismissed in 2021.