Ron Johnson finally admits Jan. 6 was violent — then blames it on 'outside agitators'

WASHINGTON — Sen. Ron Johnson acknowledged in a chat with Raw Story that the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol was violent, a fact he'd been denying for years.

In a conversation about the upcoming election and safety, Johnson said he's not worried because the Republican Party in Wisconsin has staffed all of the poll watcher positions.

Raw Story asked him about the threats election workers are receiving across the board, and Johnson downplayed them.

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"Unfortunately, we're at a time and place in our country where there are thugs on both sides of the aisle," Johnson said. "I would argue there are a lot more thugs on the left."

Justice Department data shows the opposite. The attacks on election officials are coming from MAGA fans and those on the far right.

"Just look at the protests in support of the Hamas murders. Look at the thousands of peaceful protests 570-some turned into riots that were 2020," Johnson continued, speaking of the George Floyd protests, which were largely peaceful.

Data from the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) cited in the Christian Science Monitor explained that 94 percent of protests involved no arrests, 97.9 percent involved no injuries, 98.6 percent involved no injuries to police, and 96.7 percent involved no property damage.

"Yeah, we had January 6," Johnson said, including it in his list of violent events. "But you also — based on ... eye-witness testimony, you had four distinct groups of agitators there too. So, we haven't even begun to understand the full story of what happened on Jan. 6. But anyway, so, okay, one violent episode involving conservatives and hundreds, literally hundreds, involving the left. And we're the greatest threat to democracy? Give me a break."

It's a dramatic evolution from Johnson's previous statements in which he downplayed the violence or outright ignored it.

“Even though those thousands of people that were marching to the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned,” Johnson (R-WI) told Politico in March 2021, just a few months after the attack.

Speaking to a group of conservatives in Wisconsin in 2021, he went further, implying things weren't bad for him on the Senate side of the Capitol.

“One of the reasons I’m being attacked is because I very honestly said I didn’t feel threatened on January 6. I didn’t,” Johnson said. “There was much more violence on the House side. There was no violence on the Senate side, in terms of the chamber.”

Videos of the attack from security cameras and the participants themselves showed a different story. At one point, Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman was shown antagonizing the protesters so they would fall him away from the location of the Senators at the time.

In an Oct. 2022 hearing, Johnson began claiming that there were no weapons at the Capitol during the attack, saying, "It didn't seem like an armed insurrection to me."

“There weren’t thousands of armed insurrectionists. I asked the question of the FBI agent at a hearing on this, I said, ‘How many firearms were confiscated either in the Capitol or on Capitol ground?’ I didn’t know the answer. For all I know it was going to be a thousand. No, zero. Zero,” Johnson said at the Rotary Club of Milwaukee in Wisconsin, according to a video posted online by an NBC reporter at the event.

Johnson quipped that “protesters did teach us how you can use flagpoles, that kind of stuff, as weapons. But to call what happened on January 6 an ‘armed insurrection,’ I just think, is not accurate."

Local police have dispelled the myth a number of times.

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