GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is trying to clarify comments he made about 9/11.
Ramaswamy was talking about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol when he suddenly switched to questioning whether police and federal agents were on the planes that hit the twin towers on 9/11, as reported in a piece by The Atlantic on Monday.
“I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the twin towers,” he reportedly said. “Maybe the answer is zero … I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero.”
“If we’re doing a January 6 commission, absolutely, those should be questions that we should get to the bottom of,” he added, according to the piece.
He also suggested the commission provide an itemized list of who was armed or unarmed.
“What percentage of the people who were armed were federal law-enforcement officers?” Ramaswamy asked. “I think it was probably high, actually. Right?”
Ramaswamy faced pushback over other past comments surrounding 9/11 earlier this month, when he said he didn’t believe government conclusions about what happened during the attack.
Ramaswamy was pressed on his latest comments in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Monday night.
“I am not questioning what we — this is not something I’m staking anything out on,” Ramaswamy said. “But I want the truth about 9/11.”
A spokesperson for Ramaswamy told The Hill in a statement that the GOP candidate “was referring to Jan. 6, not 9/11, as we have clarified with the Atlantic.”
Ramaswamy spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin described it as “a very free flowing conversation” and added that “the real question Vivek has is about undercover federal agents on Jan. 6, 2021, not 9/11.”