On Thursday, Ryan O’Toole, a staffer for U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and formerly a staffer for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), claimed U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Huntsville) was actively “cheering on” the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill rioters.
“I think people were still scared,” O’Toole said on Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead.” “Members and staff were still scared, not sure what was happening. And so, you did have some members express a different view. One member, Mo Brooks, for example, was glad. He was cheering on the fact the 117th Congress had started this way.”
“That was much to the dismay of others in the room, and certainly, I think, does not carry the sentiment that the day has today,” he added.
Brooks, a candidate for U.S. Senate in Alabama, immediately responded, referring to O’Toole as a “dishonorable gutter rat” for his claim.
During an appearance on Mobile radio FM Talk 106.5’s “The Jeff Poor Show,” Brooks dismissed the claim as “categorically false.”
“It is categorically false,” he said. “That is the kind of thing that your listeners can expect to see in spades over the next four months.”
Brooks reasoned that had he been engaging in that behavior, it would have been picked up on a security camera and released to the news media through the January 6 Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 events.
“[I] never personally saw at the United States Capitol or on the Capitol grounds a lawful protester or anyone who was engaged in illegal conduct inside the United States Capitol — not one. And the whole United States Capitol complex has security cameras all over the place. There are thousands of hours of security cameras.”
“If there were an instance in which I had met with one of these protesters on the Capitol grounds or one of these people who is engaged in illegal conduct and cheered them on, that would be on videotape. And that would have been released. The witch-hunt committee would have released that to the news media the very moment they saw it.”
“But the very fact of the matter is, there is no such videotape because it didn’t happen,” Brooks added. “I was unhappy, displeased with the illegal conduct in the United States Capitol. It torpedoed our effort to help the public understand the voter fraud and election theft issues that caused roughly 150 Republican congressmen and senators vote to not accept the Electoral College votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania. And quite frankly, the way it all played out — those people who did that could not have had a better script to help the socialist Democrats if Nancy Pelosi had written it herself.”
@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Alabama, the editor of Breitbart TV, a columnist for Mobile’s Lagniappe Weekly, and host of Mobile’s “The Jeff Poor Show” from 9 a.m.-12 p.m. on FM Talk 106.5.
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