They were undeterred by video showing rioters in MAGA hats, carrying Trump 2020 flags, descending on the Capitol from a rally near the White House where Trump himself had exhorted them to disrupt the counting of Electoral College votes submitted by the states, the final step in certifying Joe Biden’s victory. To them, that just showed that the insurrection was actually a leftist false-flag operation meant to embarrass the president’s peaceful supporters.
One of the first to push this narrative was Rep. Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican and part of a small group of Trump loyalists who’d pledged to challenge the Electoral College results from several states during Wednesday’s joint session of Congress in an ill-fated final attempt to undo Trump’s defeat. “Rumor: ANTIFA fascists in backwards MAGA hats,” Brooks tweeted from the locked-down Capitol where he was taking cover from the mob. “Time will tell what truth is.”
Yet it was Brooks himself, addressing Trump supporters at the rally that morning, who had dramatically removed his camouflage cap and replaced it with a bright red one emblazoned with the words “Fire Pelosi” and urged fellow Republicans in Congress to back the effort to overturn the election results, declaring, “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.”
When the House eventually reconvened Wednesday evening, one of those colleagues, the firebrand Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, declared on the floor that he had seen “some pretty compelling evidence from a facial-recognition company showing that some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters, they were masquerading as Trump supporters, and in fact were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.”