Former President Donald Trump on Friday compared the people jailed on charges that they stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent held on U.S. soil during World War II.
“Why are they still being held? No one has ever been treated like this,” he said in an interview with conservative commentator Dan Bongino. “To be honest, maybe the Japanese during World War II. They were also detained.”
The Republican presidential candidate has consistently sought to downplay the storming of the Capitol by his supporters who sought to overturn his 2020 election loss, portraying it earlier this week as a “day of love.” About 140 officers were injured that day, making it likely the largest attack by US law enforcement in a single day. Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt was shot and killed by police.
Trump has previously said the rioters have been “horribly treated” and has called those still in jail “hostages” and “victims,” repeatedly calling for their release and suggesting he would pardon them if re-elected .
Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, accused him on Thursday of misleading the public about January 6.
The federal government has incarcerated an estimated 120,000 people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, following a February 1942 order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A 1983 congressional commission concluded that the detentions were the result of “racial prejudice, war hysteria, and failure of political leadership,” and the U.S. government formally apologized five years later and paid $20,000 in reparations to each victim.
“Japanese Americans are not and should not be compared to insurgents who have committed major crimes that have injured and killed people,” said Sharon Yamato, the daughter of former Japanese Americans who were imprisoned. “And I think it’s so awful to even make that comparison or claim that there are similarities between the two.”
Trump claimed the Jan. 6 defendants had “won at the Supreme Court,” pointing to a ruling last June that curbed a federal obstruction law used to charge hundreds of Capitol riot defendants and the former president himself .
The Supreme Court ruling that Trump claims the rioters should have been released was written by Chief Justice John Roberts. In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that the charge of obstructing an official proceeding must include evidence that defendants attempted to tamper with or destroy documents. But the overwhelming majority of the roughly 1,000 people convicted or found guilty of federal crimes related to the Capitol riot were never charged with obstruction and will not be affected by the outcome.
Trump was also charged under that statute by special counsel Jack Smith’s team, which has also said the ruling should not have any impact on Trump’s prosecution on allegations that he planned to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump has insisted he was merely encouraging his supporters to protest “peacefully.” In a speech on the White House Ellipse that morning, Trump told the crowd to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol. But he also used much more inflammatory language when he spoke extemporaneously. He said, ‘We’re fighting like hell. And if you don’t fight hard, you will no longer have a country.”
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Associated Press writers Eric Tucker in Washington and Akira Kumamoto in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
