Former acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell. (Getty/Chip Somodevilla)
As a stunned America reacted to the violent storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump white supremacist mob, just one thing was certain – Richard Grenell would lie about it all.
Ripping pages straight out of the Donald Trump playbook, Grenell continued to spew wily claims around both the election results and the riots while offering next to no evidence Wednesday night (6 January).
Appearing on the Fox News Channel’s Hannity, the former ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence denied, deflected and tired to deepen division by spreading even more disinformation, the Advocate reported.
It came after Grenell dubbed the riots “unacceptable and un-American” in a tweet.
Richard Grenell spreads rumour that Antifa was behind Capitol riots. They really, really weren’t
“We have to condemn this violence,” the 54-year-old told the eponymous host Sean Hannity before purporting that “liberals” did not denounce the strong-arm tactics witnessed during the racial justice protests of last summer.
The highest-ranking openly gay official in the Trump administration also peddled the myth that left-wing activists disguised themselves as MAGA-toting thugs and trashed the Capitol complex in the seditious plot.
He said: “We need to figure out who these people are and get to the bottom of it.”
The crowds of vastly white men who heaved and broke through a police barrier, flooding the Capitol and destroying it with gleeful and swaggering contempt, were, in fact, a jumbled blob of Trump supporters, according to law enforcement agencies.
The authorities have already identified slews of the rioters, from guns rights activists to Proud Boys leaders, QAnon conspiracists to members of the National Socialist Club, a neo-Nazi group, and the Three Percenters, an armed far-right group.
This has vastly debunked the rumour that Antifa, a broad left-wing coalition of those opposing fascism, had masterminded the riots, even as reddit boards continue to ring out in reaction and lawmakers on the House floor suggest it.
After taking the time out from his busy schedule to further such disinformation, Grenell then turned to amplify Trump’s assertions of election fraud. “Transparency in the election is going to be helpful,” he said.
“If you want the public to understand what’s at stake and whether or not the vote was real, you have to be able to come clean and give us the information.”
Trump has clinched to the idea of vote tampering even in the months leading up to the presidential election and has continued even as Department of Homeland Security agencies and top election officials called the election “the most secure in American history”.
Ultimately, lawmakers reconvened in the breached and battered Congress to certify president-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.