During an interview for VICE on Showtime, Christopher Miller — who served as acting Defense Secretary at the time of the January rioting at the Capitol — blamed Donald Trump for the Capitol violence. Miller took over after Trump fired then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, and although Miller admitted that he did not know whether Trump’s incitement of the violence was intentional, he said that he saw the relationship between Trump’s remarks and the deadly rioting as pretty clear.
On January 6, when the rioting unfolded, Trump spoke at an outdoor rally in D.C., where he encouraged his supporters to “fight like hell” against the imaginary systematic election fraud that he claimed was responsible for Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. At the time, Trump also told the crowd that “we’re going to the Capitol” — and that’s exactly what they did.
Miller commented as follows:
‘Would anybody have marched on the Capitol, and tried to overrun the Capitol, without the president’s speech? I think it’s pretty much definitive that wouldn’t have happened. It seems cause-and-effect. The question is, did he know he was enraging people to do that? I don’t know.’
Check out Miller’s comments below:
On the day of the rioting, Trump openly justified the violence. He wrote on Twitter that “these are the things and events that happen” when a rightful election victory is stolen — which, of course, did not actually happen in any respect, no matter his delusional claims otherwise. Trump was impeached by the House on a charge of incitement of insurrection after the violence, but he did not abandon his cuckoo rigged election claims. He’s reiterated his fantasyland idea that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election as recently as this year’s edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which was late last month.
Miller added on VICE on Showtime that he would not have followed an order that he felt was against the law. As he put it:
‘I knew that I was not going to cross any of those lines, and if asked, I would resign. If it’s antithetical to the Constitution or the Uniform Code of Military Justice, it’s an illegal order and you don’t follow it.’
Miller was involved in the National Guard response to the Capitol rioting. His approval was required before dispatching personnel to the Capitol.
