Fact-Check: Biden Falsely Claims 5 Cops Were Killed by Trump Supporters on Jan. 6
During a speech delivered in Wisconsin where he tried to reframe his failed “Build Back Better” plan, Joe Biden made the offhanded claim that “five cops” were “killed” during the so-called “insurrection” on Jan. 6 of last year, when in fact no police officers died at the Capitol that day.
After his State of the Union Speech on Tuesday, Biden hit the road to push what he is now calling his “Building a Better America” agenda, which is really little more than a new name slapped on his “Build Back Better” plan that is already DOA in Congress.
During his laundry list speech delivered Wednesday at a school in Superior, Wis., Biden wrapped up his speech with an attempt to claim that Americans are united under his regime. But in formulating his stand, he made an utterly false claim about what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.
Close to the end of his remarks, Biden admitted that the U.S.A. is “not even close” to being perfect, but added that Vladimir Putin was “counting on being able to split up the United States.”
Then Biden went on to characterize how other nations saw the events of Jan. 6, though he did not specifically mention that date. He also tried to claim — again without saying it in explicit terms — that Vladimir Putin was emboldened to attack Ukraine because of the Jan. 6 protest.
“Look, how would you feel if you saw crowds storm and break down the doors of the British Parliament, kill five cops, injure 145 — or the German Bundestag or the Italian Parliament? I think you’d wonder,” Biden said.
“Well, that’s what the rest of the world saw. It’s not who we are. And now, we’re proving, under pressure, that we are not that country. We’re united,” Biden concluded.
This claim that the pro-Trump protesters on Jan. 6 went on to “kill five cops” is 100 percent fiction. In truth, not a single police officer died that day.
Even left-wing PolitiFact had to admit that no police officers died during the events of Jan. 6.
Only one officer died in the immediate aftermath of the protest, and that was Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died of natural causes one day after the protests ended. The best that left-wingers can do to claim that Sicknick was a “victim” of the protests is to claim that the stress of the protests “contributed” to the strokes that took his life. But even that is conjecture, not medical fact.
The other four officers who died — long after the protest ended — all died from suicide. Not a single officer died during the protests and none died as a direct action of any protester.
Indeed, the only actual death that occurred on that day happened when a Capitol Police officer gunned down an unarmed Trump supporter who had joined the protesters inside the Capitol building.
Ashli Babbitt, a 36-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran gunned down by Capitol Police officer Lt. Michael Byrd, was unarmed. She later died from her wounds.
Without evidence, Lt. Byrd defended his actions claiming he “saved lives” by gunning the unarmed woman down.
“I know that day I saved countless lives,” Byrd claimed in an NBC News interview. “I know members of Congress, as well as my fellow officers and staff, were in jeopardy and in serious danger. And that’s my job.”
Despite Byrd’s claim that he “saved lives” by discharging his firearm, there was no evidence that any of the protesters attacked anyone during the Capitol incursion.
Still, if Biden wants to decry the deaths of police officers, he should be talking about the horrible statistic that more officers were killed in the line of duty during Biden’s first year in office than in any other year since 1995.
Early in February, Fox News Sunday noted that 73 police officers were killed in 2021, a 59 percent increase over the 46 officers killed in 2020. This horrid statistic comes after years of Black Lives Matter protests and Democrats calling police officers “killers,” not to mention two years of the Democrat-led “defund the police” movement.
If Biden wants to sound like he supports America’s police forces, he should stop inventing fictions about Jan. 6 and denounce the left’s years of attacks on the police.
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