MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough on Friday reacted to the previous day’s House Select Committee primetime hearings over the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Scarborough said then-Vice President Mike Pence’s “life was in danger,” and then-President Donald Trump knew it. The host added that the former president had “been whipping up hatred” against Pence the entire day.
“[I] t’s surreal, what’s going on,” Scarborough emphasized, “but you stop, actually, and I saw somebody yesterday, I think he writes for the L.A. Times, talking about how when you realize that Donald Trump, in effect, was trying to cause Mike Pence to be killed or injured in a serious way, swept up by the mob, this one person came to the conclusion that it was really the worst thing that a sitting president has done in the history of this republic. But think about that for a second, Willie. I mean, Donald Trump knew Mike Pence’s life was in danger. He knew that people were trying to get a hold of him, trying to find him. He’d been whipping hatred up against him all day, started with that rally, and then, when Mike Pence is chased, and he’s running around, and they’re trying to find a safe location for his family and himself, that’s when Donald Trump sends the tweet that, as testimony suggested yesterday, just threw more gas on the fire.”
“And, boy, Willie, they were close to finding him and, as the testimony suggested yesterday because the Proud Boys and I believe the Oath Keepers were some of the first people in there, the threat to Mike Pence’s life was real,” he continued. “If they’d found him, they likely would have killed him or caused him serious, serious harm, as well as his family. And, again … we’re so shocked but not surprised by what Donald Trump does that yesterday was just another day to stop and say a President of the United States was working actively to cause bodily harm or death to the Vice President of the United States. That’s just, again, it’s just never happened before in the history of this country.”
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