Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney strongly criticized Donald Trump on Sunday, calling out his former boss over the ex-president’s latest lies about the deadly Capitol riot he incited.
Trump this week slammed the Capitol security measures that were put in place in the aftermath of the deadly January 6 insurrection, which left five people dead including a Capitol police officer.
“I think it’s disgraceful—it looks, for the world to watch—absolutely, it’s a political maneuver that they’re doing. It was zero threat right from the start, it was zero threat,” he said before adding that the rioters were “hugging and kissing” the Capitol guards.
Mulvaney called Trump’s remarks “false.”
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“I was surprised to hear the president say that,” he said. “Clearly, there were people who were behaving themselves and then there were people who absolutely were not,” Mulvaney said during an interview on CNN’s Newsroom on Saturday.
“To come out and say that everybody was fine and there was no risk is just, that’s manifestly false,” he said. “People died. Other people were severely injured. To say there was no risk is just wrong.”
Mulvaney explained that he watched the riots unfold live on television and saw violence take place.
“There are videos of folks behaving themselves and protesting peacefully. But they should not have been there. And it’s not right to say there was no risk. I don’t know how you can say that when people were killed,” he said.
Trump’s comments came after the world has been presented with reams of video evidence of the violence that broke out on January 6, charges filed against alleged rioters, police officers’ accounts of the violence and lawmakers’ descriptions of the fear they experienced that day. The riot left five people dead, including Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, and more than 100 other police officers were injured.
Still, Mulvaney said he “absolutely would” still vote for Trump if he were to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
Mulvaney acknowledged, however, that if Trump were to run again, he’d likely have to answer for the events of January 6.
“He’s still a major player in the Republican Party; there’s a lot of folks who were turned off by the last six weeks, and especially the riots, that he’s going to have to do some work to sort of build bridges back with, if he wants to run again.”
Watch the interview below via CNN:
