In a Fox News interview Monday night, Pennsylvania Republican Kathy Barnette was twice asked if she went into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and twice she declined to give a clear denial.
Bret Baier asked the Senate candidate, whose electoral prospects have suddenly risen in the last two weeks, about photographs verified earlier in the day by NBC News that show her marching beside members of the far-right group the Proud Boys in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6. Barnette has acknowledged she attended the Stop the Steal rally that day but has denied entering the Capitol. Her campaign also released a statement saying she “has no connection whatsoever” to the Proud Boys.
“First of all,” Baier began, “did you go into the Capitol? And how do you talk about that day?”
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Barnette responded not with a denial but by saying she was “not with” the Proud Boys.
“I was out there because I wanted to hear what the president had to say,” she said, then proceeded to list several of the rights protected by the First Amendment. “So as a law-abiding American citizen, I had every right to go to a rally in support of my president. That is what I was doing there. We had a wonderful time. We prayed. We listened to what the president had to say. We hung out. We walked and sang songs and then we got on our bus and left and came back home. And so that is the beginning and the end of that.”
Barnette then lobbed several absurd and baseless accusations against “the media.” The photographs of her on Jan. 6, she claimed, are part of the press “smearing my name and sowing seeds of disinformation in order to suppress my vote and steal this election from me.”
Baier again asked Barnette directly: “Just to clarify, you didn’t go into the Capitol that day?”
“I said I sang, I prayed, I listened to my president,” Barnette replied, laughing briefly at one point, “and walked and then got on the bus and came home.”
Barnette chartered buses to and from Washington, D.C., for attendees of the Stop the Steal rally. A few weeks prior, she urged Trump supporters in a Facebook video to “fight, fight, fight” to forestall a Biden presidency. “This is our country,” she said then. “This is not their country. This is our country.”
