Marco Rubio was confronted with his own damning assessment of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol when asked about Donald Trump’s pardons for around 1,500 of the rioters on Tuesday.
Rubio appeared on ABC News’ Good Morning America shortly before he was sworn in as secretary of state in Washington, D.C. After congratulating the former Florida senator on being unanimously confirmed by the Senate, host George Stephanopoulos asked Rubio about the pardons and his comments in a video he released at the time of the Capitol riot decrying “one of the saddest days in our history.”
“Back when this happened, you called it a ‘national embarrassment,’ saying: ‘We now have third world countries that are lecturing us and we have tinpot dictators that are mocking us,’” Stephanopoulos said. “Of course, you’re now America’s top diplomat, you’ll be speaking with your counterparts around the world. What message does that pardon send to them?”
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“I don’t anticipate a single one of our partners will ask about it,” Rubio said of the Jan. 6 pardons, adding: “I won’t be opining on domestic matters at this point because frankly my focus needs to be 100 percent on how I interact with our counterparts, our adversaries, our potential enemies around the world, to keep this country safe.”
Stephanopolous followed up by pointing out that as a senator, Rubio said the riot “affected our standing in the world.”
“You don’t believe that anymore?” the host asked.
“Well, as a senator, I had an opinion on all kinds of domestic matters,” Rubio answered. “But now, I’m focused singularly on foreign policy and how I interact with our allies.”
In one of the first official acts of his second term, Trump granted clemency to those prosecuted for their actions during the riot—including those who assaulted law enforcement and leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Rubio released a video online in the hours after the mob of Trump supporters stormed into the Capitol in an effort to stop the certification of the result of the 2020 election. Trump had falsely claimed the election was stolen—a lie he repeated again on Monday in a speech to his supporters after his second inauguration.
“Sadly, today seems almost inevitable,” Rubio said in his video in January, 2021. “Because with our increasingly heated rhetoric and our wild conspiracies, our politics has been playing with fire for a long, long time.”
