Former President Trump announced he will hold a news conference at his south Florida resort and residence early next month.
“I will be having a news conference on January 6th at Mar-a-Lago,” he said Tuesday in a statement released by Save America, one of his political committees.
Jan. 6, 2022 will mark one year since the storming of the U.S. Capitol by right-wing extremists and other supporters of Trump, who aimed to disrupt congressional certification of now President Biden‘s Electoral College victory over Trump in the 2020 election.
For over a year, Trump has repeatedly made unfounded claims that the presidential election was riddled with “massive” voter fraud and “stolen.” And he repeated those false charges in his latest statement, once again describing his electoral defeat as “the rigged Presidential Election of 2020” and that “the insurrection took place on November 3rd.”
In the weeks after the 2020 election, dozens of legal challenges by Trump and his allies were shot down in the half dozen states where Biden narrowly edged Trump to secure a convincing Electoral College victory. And then-Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department had not seen fraud on the kind of scale that could flip the election.
The Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol came soon after the president urged a large crowd of supporters he addressed at a rally near the White House to march to the Capitol and show strength in protesting the certification of the election by Congress. Five people – four protesters and a Capitol Police officer – died in the riot.
In the wake of the attack, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for inciting the riot. Ten House Republicans joined the majority Democrats in voting to impeach the then-president.
Trump, who refused to concede his election defeat, became the first president in a century-and-a-half to skip the inauguration of his successor.