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Trump says he wanted to march to Capitol on Jan. 6 but Secret Service stopped him

Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he wanted to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the day a violent mob of his supporters stormed the building, but that his Secret Service detail prevented him from joining them.

“Secret Service said I couldn’t go,” Trump told the Washington Post in a wide-ranging interview. “I would have gone there in a minute."

Trump also deflected blame for his silence during the attack, insisting that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who was taken to a secure location with other lawmakers as the mob breached the building — bore responsibility for not ending the violence.

“I thought it was a shame, and I kept asking, 'Why isn’t she doing something about it? Why isn’t Nancy Pelosi doing something about it?' And the mayor of D.C. also. The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge,” Trump said. “I hated seeing it. I hated seeing it. And I said, ‘It’s got to be taken care of,’ and I assumed they were taking care of it.”

Rioters clash with police at the entrance to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Rioters clash with police at the entrance to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

As Trump watched the attack unfold on television from the White House, he made calls pushing lawmakers to overturn the election.

Last month, the Post and CBS News reported that White House logs that were turned over to the House's Jan. 6 select committee show a gap of more than seven hours between Trump's calls — prompting the panel to investigate whether he communicated that day through back channels, phones of aides or disposable phones known as burner phones.

Trump told the Post he didn’t remember “getting very many” phone calls that day. And he denied removing call logs or using burner phones.

“From the standpoint of telephone calls, I don’t remember getting very many,” he said, adding: "Why would I care about who called me? If congressmen were calling me, what difference did it make? There was nothing secretive about it. There was no secret.”

The former president said he did not regret using incendiary rhetoric in his speech at the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the riot, insisting he told his supporters to be “peaceful and patriotic.” He also told them to “fight like hell.”

“We fight. We fight like hell,” Trump said in his speech at the Ellipse. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Then-President Donald Trump speaks during a rally at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.
Then-President Donald Trump speaks during a rally at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021. (Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In the interview with the Post, Trump repeatedly bragged about the size of the crowd at the rally.

“The crowd was far bigger than I even thought. I believe it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to. I don’t know what that means, but you see very few pictures. They don’t want to show pictures, the fake news doesn’t want to show pictures,” he said. “But this was a tremendous crowd.”

The attack that followed left multiple people dead and more than 140 officers injured. More than 725 people have been charged by the Justice Department.

The bipartisan select committee probing the insurrection has issued hundreds of subpoenas and interviewed scores of witnesses from Trump’s inner circle, including his daughter and former White House adviser Ivanka Trump. (He called the committee’s interview with her “harassment.”)

Others, like former Trump aides Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino, refused to comply with the committee. The House voted Wednesday to hold them both in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the committee.

Trump told the Post he had not been contacted by the Jan. 6 committee and said he wasn’t sure what he would do if he were. He and his lawyers have repeatedly invoked executive privilege in an effort to block the panel from obtaining documents.