Pre-Jan. 6 Capitol Police Report Warned Louie Gohmert ‘Seemed to Encourage Violence’

On Jan. 3, 2021, the United States Capitol Police noted an appearance by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Newsmax (embedded above) on Jan. 1, 2021 where he “seemed to encourage violence,” according to an internal assessment obtained by Politico.

Gohmert was one of the most prominent election conspiracy theorists in Congress promoting the false claim the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.

In that appearance, Gohmert reacted to a federal court’s decision earlier in the day not to hear his half-baked lawsuit seeking to force then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election. The court ruled Gohmert had no standing.

He told Newsmax at the time that the “bottom line is, the court is saying we’re not going to touch this, you have no remedy, basically in effect the ruling would be that you got to go to the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM.”

“In an interview Friday evening on pro-Trump news network Newsmax, Representative Gohmert claimed that letting the will of the voters stand would ‘mean the end of our republic, the end of the experiment in self-government,’” read the Capitol Police report making notice of the Texas congressman’s comments. “Representative Gohmert then seemed to encourage violence as a means to this end. ‘But bottom line is, the court is saying, ‘We’re not going to touch this. You have no remedy – basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go to the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM.’”

Gohmert faced some criticism at the time, prompting him to release a statement saying that he had “not encouraged and unequivocally do not advocate for violence.”

Five days after Gohmert’s appearance on Newsmax, the U.S. Capitol was stormed and the certification of the election results was temporarily halted.