By Gram Slattery
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden implored Americans in an op-ed published on Sunday not to forget the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, writing that the country has a collective obligation to remember the events of that day.
The article, published in The Washington Post, comes a day before the U.S. Congress will meet to formally certify Republican Donald Trump’s election as president and nearly four years after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in a failed bid to block the certification of his 2020 election loss.
“We must remember the wisdom of the adage that any nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it,” Biden wrote.
“We cannot accept a repeat of what occurred four years ago.”
He added that the election certification process would be peaceful this time around.
Biden has consistently portrayed Trump as a threat to democracy, and he has pointed to Trump’s failure to accept defeat in the 2020 election as proof. The president made defense of democracy a central element of his re-election campaign, which he abandoned in July after mounting concerns about his age.
Kamala Harris, who replaced Biden atop the Democratic ticket, portrayed Trump in similar terms.
Trump was federally indicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which he lost, but the case moved slowly and was nowhere near resolution by the time he won the 2024 election in November.
Trump, who will start a second non-consecutive term in two weeks, does not acknowledge his 2020 election loss as legitimate, and he and his allies have peddled false theories about the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
He has promised to issue widespread pardons of people convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6 attack. Many of the convictions related to assaulting law enforcement officers, among other felonies.
“An unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite – even erase – the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes,” Biden wrote in the Washington Post.
“In time, there will be Americans who didn’t witness the Jan. 6 riot firsthand but will learn about it from footage and testimony of that day, from what is written in history books and from the truth we pass on to our children. We cannot allow the truth to be lost.”
(Reporting by Gram Slattery; Editing by Don Durfee and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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