Days before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, an assessment by U.S. Capitol Police analysts highlighted heated remarks by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) as potentially encouraging violence over Donald Trump’s presidential election defeat, Politico reported.
The analysts noted in a Jan. 3, 2021, report obtained by Politico that Gohmert said on “pro-Trump news network Newsmax” two days earlier that “letting the will of the voters stand would ‘mean the end of our republic, the end of the experiment in self-government.’”
He then “seemed to encourage violence as a means to this end,” the intelligence report noted, according to Politico.
“Bottom line is, the court is saying, ‘We’re not going to touch this,’” said Gohmert, referring to his failed suit to challenge the 2020 presidential election results, which Trump claimed were rigged. “You have no remedy ― basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go to the streets and be as violent” as antifa, the catch-all name given to anti-fascist counterprotesters, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
The analysis also noted that Trump supporters’ “sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent.”
Gohmert was quickly criticized at the time for appearing to call for violence. Gohmert insisted in a tweet then that he had “not encouraged” violence and unequivocally did not advocate for violence.
He reiterated that to Politico in response to the story.
Gohmert spoke out against the violence on the day of the Capitol riot. “Please people; no violence. That only hurts our cause,” he tweeted on Jan. 6.