Matt Gaetz Makes Absurd Claim Trump Supporters Who Stormed Capitol Were Actually Antifa

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) declared on the House floor Wednesday night that the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol earlier were actually “Antifa,” a comment so detached from reality it prompted loud groans from his fellow lawmakers.

Trump supporters descended on Washington D.C. Wednesday in order to protest the certification of Joe Biden’s election win. At a rally Wednesday morning, the president told those supporters to head to the Capitol building and protest the counting of electoral votes. A horde of rioters, wearing MAGA hats and waving Trump flags, stormed the building, overwhelming police. The group that broke into the Capitol building included prominent social media supporters of Trump.

The rumor that the mob was not a group of Trump supporters, but left-wing agitators posing as them, spread on social media Wednesday. As these things always do, it started with crackpots like Lin Wood and Candace Owens, before being embraced by more prominent pro-Trump voices like Brit Hume and Matt Gaetz.

Gaetz pushed the deranged conspiracy theory on the House floor, attributing it to a report in the Washington Times.

He said the report contained “pretty compelling evidence from a facial recognition company showing that some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters, they were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact were members of the violent terrorist group Antifa.”

The Washington Times report he is referring to is a short piece in which an unnamed “retired military officer” claimed a facial recognition company identified two members of the mob as members of antifa.

That incredibly flimsy report was posted on Twitter by Fox News host Laura Ingraham.

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