NY-22 Minute: Rep. Tenney suggests Capitol rioters not all Trump supporters, differs significantly from neighboring GOP Rep. John Katko on insurrection By Luke Perry
Rep. John Katko (R) was comfortably reelected last fall to a fourth term in NY-24, while Claudia Tenney (R) narrowly defeated Rep. Anthony Brindisi (D) in a historically close race separated by 109 votes. The two districts were among the most watched and contested House races in 2018 and 2020.
Katko was in the U.S. Capitol during the January 6 insurrection and is privy to related classified briefings as the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee.
“I can’t even describe to you what the Capitol Hill police officers, men and women, looked like,” Katko said afterwards. “A lot of them had torn shirts, torn stuff. They had bloody hands, scratches and bumps and bruises on their faces.” Katko told Syracuse.com “they looked like they were shell-shocked, like after a war” and “it was much worse than people realized.”
Katko sheltered in place in his office with the lights off and door barricaded. “Every time you hear steps going down the hall,” Katko said, “you’re like ‘OK, is this it?’”
Photo from Rep. Katko
5 people were killed, including police officers and military veterans. Hundreds more were injured and terrorized, as the lives of America’s top elected officials, including the Vice President, Speaker of the House, and Senate Majority Leader were endangered, as well as every member of Congress and their staffs. Property damage to the U.S. Capitol is projected to exceed $30 million.
Ms. Tenney, a NY-22 candidate on January 6, Tweeted that day:
“Deep concerns over election integrity do not justify violence or property destruction. We can only safeguard our Constitution & the Rule of Law by acting legally & peacefully. Those who threaten, attack & destroy betray our fundamental rights of free speech & assembly.”
Yesterday Tenney said that President Trump was not in a position to stop the insurrection and that a lot of the people involved were not Trump supporters.
“To say that the president could’ve stopped these people, I think a lot of them probably weren’t ever Trump people, they were determined to go in there, and some of them were probably Trump people that are off the rail,” Tenney told Tom Magnarelli (WSKG/WRVO).
Tenney joins a few Republican members of Congress, such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (FL-1) and Senator Ron Johnson (WI), who have suggested that Trump supporters were not largely responsible for the insurrection.
According to the Associate Press, the Capitol insurrectionists were “overwhelmingly made up of longtime Trump supporters, including Republican Party officials, GOP political donors, far-right militants, white supremacists, and adherents of the QAnon myth that the government is secretly controlled by a cabal of the Satan-worshiping pedophile cannibals.” This assessment was based on examination of social media posts, voter registrations, court filings of over 120 people indicted in the January 6 insurrection.
Photo by U.S. Embassy
Tenney would have voted against impeaching Trump, the second time, because fiery language adopted by Republicans and Democrats is protected by the First Amendment. “I would have been really torn” about whether to certify the presidential election results, Tenney said.
As a self-described “constitutionalist,” Tenney explained that “when the board of elections certifies, and there’s nothing presented to make you turn the other way, that would’ve driven me to vote against objecting.” On the other hand, “there were so many cases where we didn’t really get to the bottom of it and cases seemed questionable.”
Rep. Katko, a former federal prosecutor, did not object to the presidential results, stating at the time there was “no demonstration of widespread fraud.” Kakto voted to impeach Trump, citing his repeated encouragement of the insurrection and failure to call it off, which endangered many people.
“It cannot be ignored that President Trump encouraged this insurrection – both on social media ahead of January 6th, and in his speech that day. By deliberately promoting baseless theories suggesting the election was somehow stolen, the president created a combustible environment of misinformation, disenfranchisement, and division. When this manifested in violent acts on January 6th, he refused to promptly and forcefully call it off, putting countless lives in danger.”
This is not the first time Reps. Katko and Tenney have differed on President Trump. Tenney previously described the Trump presidency as “the most successful in modern history. Katko and Tenney supported a relatively similar amount of Trump-endorsed polices when they served together in 2017 and 2018, but Katko has been more critical of Trump and less interested in his endorsement and campaign support.
Luke Perry (@PolSciLukePerry) is Chair and Professor of Government at Utica College
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