MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In these final days of campaigning, both candidates are talking a lot about the attack on the U.S. Capitol that happened on January 6 of 2021. Vice President Kamala Harris will deliver a speech tonight at The Ellipse in Washington, D.C. That's the same spot that then-President Donald Trump spoke to his supporters just before the invasion of the Capitol. Here is how Trump talks about that day now. This is from a town hall earlier this month on Univision.
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DONALD TRUMP: That was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions. It's, like, hundreds of thousands. It could have been the largest group I've ever spoken before. They asked me...
MARTIN: NPR's Tom Dreisbach has been covering January 6 for the last few years, and we brought him on to fact-check this. Good morning, Tom.
TOM DREISBACH, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: Let me start with something else that Trump said at that Univision town hall about whether the rioters were armed that day. Let's listen.
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TRUMP: There were no guns down there. We didn't have guns. The others had guns, but we didn't have guns. And when I say we, these are people that walked down. This was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody shows.
MARTIN: So Tom, can you unpack that?
DREISBACH: Yeah. So first, it's important to note that he said we to describe the people who attacked the Capitol.
MARTIN: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like he's identifying with the rioters. Is that how you hear that?
DREISBACH: Yeah, exactly. And that is in line with his promise to pardon the rioters. He's even reposted on social media that, quote, "the cops should be charged, and the protesters should be freed." And then there's the claim that there were no guns. That is just completely false. I covered the very first trial that came out of January 6. The defendant was a man named Guy Reffitt. He went to the Capitol with body armor, a handgun. Back at his hotel, he had an AR-15-type rifle. He was convicted and is still in prison, and he wasn't alone.
We'll never know how many guns were there on January 6 'cause there were so few arrests on that day. But we know of about 20 cases involving guns at the Capitol. One rioter outside the Capitol had a revolver - actually shot it into the air twice. And in a case that was unsealed just this month, we learned of another man who brought a handgun onto Capitol grounds and had a small arsenal back at his hotel.
MARTIN: Another big topic for Trump is that the January 6 defendants in prison - he calls them, quote, "hostages." Here's what he said in a podcast interview earlier this month.
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TRUMP: Why are they still being held? Nobody's ever been treated like this.
DAN BONGINO: Yeah.
TRUMP: Nobody's ever - maybe the Japanese during Second World War, frankly. But, you know, they were held, too.
MARTIN: It sounds like he's comparing the January 6 defendants to the Japanese internment during World War II. So Tom, tell us more about this. What are the facts here?
DREISBACH: Yeah. During World War II, the U.S. government forcibly detained more than 100,000 people, not for any crimes - just because of their Japanese ancestry. Most of them were American citizens. When it comes to January 6, there are about 1,500 people all charged with crimes. Most have pleaded guilty. A small number of those folks were jailed before their trials because they were accused of serious crimes, like assault or seditious conspiracy, or they were considered too dangerous to be released before trial. But most people are allowed home before they go to trial. And in about a third of cases, the defendant has gotten no jail time at all. They get probation. The average sentence - the median - is less than a year in jail. And so there's just really no comparison between these two events.
MARTIN: As we mentioned, the Democrat Kamala Harris has also been talking a lot about January 6. Let's listen to something she said on NBC earlier this month.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: This is a person - Donald Trump - who tried to undo the - a free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people, who incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol, and 140 law enforcement officers were attacked. Some were killed.
MARTIN: Tom, I'm going to ask you to walk us through the nuances here, and this is where I also would like to let our listeners know that suicide is involved here.
DREISBACH: Right. It is accurate that 140 officers were injured that day. In terms of the deaths, there's some important contexts. An officer named Brian Sicknick was assaulted with pepper spray that night. He had a stroke, and he died the following day. The official cause of death is the stroke, though the medical examiner said everything that transpired on January 6 played a role in his death, and his family does blame the assault. And then in the days immediately after the attack, two officers who protected the Capitol on January 6 died by suicide. Their deaths have been classified as in the line of duty, meaning linked to the trauma they experienced on the 6.
MARTIN: That is NPR investigative correspondent Tom Dreisbach. Tom, thank you.
DREISBACH: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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