On the eve of the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot, an accused rioter pleaded for Donald Trump’s aid in a call from a jailhouse phone in Washington, D.C.
Edward Jacob Lang, a 25-year-old from upstate New York charged with assaulting a police officer with a bat, made his last-ditch, Trump-focused cry for help during a Wednesday evening interview with far-right personality Stew Peters.
“I am so disappointed in Trump for canceling his January 6th press conference,” Lang said during the call-in interview, where he noted that he was on the brink of crying as he urged Trump to step up and fight for the defendants, like himself, who have been charged for their roles in the riot nearly one year ago.
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“It just shows how far we have fallen,” he continued, “where is our rally tomorrow?” He added that “there should be a hundred thousand people in D.C. tomorrow at the very minimum…I am so disappointed with Trump and the American people at large that just do not get behind the January 6 political prisoners.”
“President Trump, where are you?” Lang asked aloud at one point.
“You better do a press conference, man,” he concluded, addressing the ex-president. “We are rotting in jail because we stood up for what you told us to stand up for!”
Subsequently, Peters, echoing an increasingly common sentiment in Trumpworld, voiced his own frustration with Trump for nixing the press conference he’d planned for Thursday, reportedly due to informal advisors cautioning the ex-president that the media event could backfire.
“We had hoped that Trump would address all of the evidence that the chaos of January 6th was orchestrated by agent provocateurs,” the right-wing radio shock jock fumed. “Instead, Mar-a-Lago has signaled today a surrender of the narrative.”
Earlier Wednesday morning, former Trump advisors Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon made their own last-minute pleas to the ex-president to place his counter-programming event back on the books.
“The person who should be holding a press conference tomorrow, above anybody, pounding on the frickin’ table—particularly given [the] cesspool in Georgia, the cesspool of Arizona—is Donald John Trump,” Navarro said on Bannon’s War Room Pandemic podcast.
“Call the press conference!” said Bannon.
