US President Joe Biden is set to tell Americans that former president Donald Trump carries "singular responsibility” for the deadly January 6 Capitol attack as he prepares to mark the first anniversary of the riot by Trump's supporters.
Two weeks before Biden’s presidency, Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol building, where lawmakers were in the process of confirming Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election.
The bloody attack resulted in the death of at least five people, including a police officer.
In a speech from the Capitol's Statuary Hall on Thursday, Biden will “lay out the significance of what happened in the Capitol,” according to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
She said Biden will take the speech about “the singular responsibility President Trump has for the chaos and carnage that we saw.”
The Democratic president “will forcibly push back on the lies spread by the former president in an attempt to mislead the American people and his own supporters as well as distract from his role in what happened," Psaki said.
She further said that Biden has been "clear eyed about the threat the former president represents to our democracy.”
Vice President Kamala Harris is also scheduled to speak on Thursday morning at the US Capitol.
She will use her remarks to call for “free and fair elections and safeguard our democracy for generations to come," according to an administration official.
A former FBI special agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley said on Wednesday that Democrats are desperately “trying their hardest to make hay out of the incident to their respective advantage.”
Trump was impeached, for the second time, for inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol building on the opening weeks of Biden's presidency.
The Republican president, however, was ultimately acquitted.
On Thursday, Trump canceled a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida that had been scheduled for Thursday evening, citing the "bias and dishonesty" of the House of Representatives probe of the attacks and the news media.