House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., suggested former President Donald Trump could be charged as an accessory to murder for speaking to a crowd of supporters the afternoon of the Jan. 6 Capitol siege.
In an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday, Pelosi accused Trump of inciting violence and claimed the Capitol building would not have been ransacked had it not been for Trump’s speech that day.
“[The] president’s words are important, they weigh a ton. And if you’re Donald Trump talking to these people, they believe it and they used his words to come here,” Pelosi said.
She then floated the conspiracy theory that Republican lawmakers were working with rioters, even though there is no evidence to support the accusation.
“When we talk about ‘did any of our colleagues collaborate?’” Pelosi continued. “Well, that remains to be seen. We have to get the evidence of that. And if they did, they would be accessory to the crime. And the crime, in some cases, was murder.”
“And this president is an accessory to that crime because he instigated that insurrection that caused those deaths and this destruction,” she added.
Pelosi argued Trump would have destroyed U.S. democracy had he been elected to a second term.
“I do think that we’re bigger than all of this. Donald Trump was a stain on our country. I don’t think we could have sustained our democracy if he had two terms in office, for what he was doing to our institution or what he was doing to our Constitution. He dishonored it,” she said.
House Democrats impeached Trump for the second time for “inciting an insurrection,” though Trump’s speech was far from over when the siege at the Capitol began, and he exhorted supporters to walk to the Capitol “peacefully.”
