High-ranking Democratic officials raised eyebrows Sunday by comparing the alleged threat to democracy posed by Trump supporters on January 6 to the September 11 hijackings which claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 American civilians in 2001.
Claiming that “the threat of terror” from abroad “has diminished,” Senate Intelligence chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he’s now worried “about some of the activity in this country where [sic] the election deniers, the insurgency that took place on Jan. 6.”
“I remember, as most Americans do, where they were on 9/11… The stunning thing to me is here we are 20 years later, and the attack on the symbol of our democracy was not coming from terrorists, but it came from literally insurgents attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6,” insisted Warner.
Vice President Kamala Harris also denounced Republicans as a threat to the US on Sunday – though, characteristically, she was significantly less specific in her condemnation – claiming on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that such a “domestic threat” makes the United States “weaker.”
While “we don’t compare” domestic versus foreign terrorism, “we know they both can exist and we must defend against it,” Harris claimed.
Biden: Trump, MAGA Republicans ‘Represent Extremism’ That Threaten ‘Very Foundation of Our Republic’
2 September 2022, 00:13 GMT
“The fact is having served under the Senate Intelligence Committee and now as vice president, I can tell you the nature of domestic threat versus a foreign threat - they’re very different,” said the vice president. “Note, both are harmful and extremely dangerous, but they’re very different.”
The remarks by top Democrats come less than two weeks since US President Joe Biden shocked observers with a widely-discussed address on the “Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation” in which he claimed the previous president and his supporters “do not believe in the rule of law” and accused them of posing a “threat” to the “very foundations” of the US.