Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that then-President Trump’s statement telling the rioters to leave the Capitol was “BS.”
CNN aired footage that filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) daughter, took on the day of the insurrection on “Anderson Cooper 360” on Thursday.
Schumer and Pelosi were taken to Fort McNair, an Army base on the Potomac River, after the Capitol was evacuated as the insurrection unfolded, where they called multiple officials from the Trump administration to seek help from the National Guard to stop the attack.
Footage showed Schumer speaking by phone to then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, pressing him to tell Trump to call off the rioters and tell them to go home.
Rosen repeatedly avoids directly committing to asking Trump to make a statement, causing Schumer to appear to get frustrated.
“Please answer my question,” Schumer says, followed by silence from Rosen.
“Answer my question,” Schumer says again.
Trump eventually gave a prerecorded statement after hours passed during the riot, in which he maintained that the election was “fraudulent” and that the rioters were “very special” but telling them to go home and that “we have to have peace.”
“We shouldn’t let him off the hook, Nancy,” Schumer says at Fort McNair in response to the statement. “We issued a statement saying he’s got to make a statement — he comes up with this BS.”
Pelosi says that insurrection is a crime and that Trump is guilty of it.
Trump has received sharp criticism for the amount of time that passed on the day of the insurrection before he made a statement and for the statement itself, in which he repeated his false claims that the election was a fraud and complimented those at the Capitol.