Former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, who is now an MSNBC analyst, said Monday that Attorney General Merrick Garland would "go down in infamy as one of the worst attorney generals in this country’s history" if former President Trump isn’t held accountable for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
McCaskill - who wanted to lay out facts "like an opening statement" - declared that Trump "watched TV all day long for four years" and therefore must have been watching the chaos of Jan. 6 unfold in real time.
"He watched all the channels," McCaskill told MSNBC colleague Nicolle Wallace.
"We can go through and put the images at a specific time and we can then fill in the text messages, the phone calls, that were flooding the White House saying, ‘Get him to call them off.’ Now, what was he watching on TV at those moments? He was watching windows being broken, he was watching police officers being stabbed with flag poles, he was watching people hang from the balcony in the Senate, he was watching people carry around government property proudly like trophies in the Capitol and, frankly, he was watching a confrontation at the door of the House where someone was killed," McCaskill said before setting her sights on Garland.
"That’s what this committee is going to lay out," she said. "That’s where Merrick Garland is either going to rise to the occasion or go down in infamy as one of the worst attorney generals in this country’s history."
Ironically, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., told Fox News in November that Garland "is going to go down at this point as one of the worst attorneys general in American history" following an explosive Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where he told Garland to resign. However, Hawley was referring to the attorney general's memo announcing an investigation into alleged threats and intimidation of school boards and not the Capitol riot.
McCaskill was defeated in 2018 in her bid for a third term by Hawley. She joined MSNBC in 2019.
HAWLEY SAYS GARLAND WILL GO DOWN AS 'ONE OF THE WORST' AGS IN US HISTORY
McCaskill and her MSNBC colleagues have spent significant coverage on the Jan. 6 riot throughout the year. In July, McCaskill raised eyebrows when she announced that on "Every Fourth of July going forward" she will watch the 40-minute New York Times video about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
"We’re going to start a new family tradition in my family. On the Fourth of July and every Fourth of July going forward, we’re going to watch that video that The New York Times put together of January 6," McCaskill told MSNBC’s Willie Geist.
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McCaskill's brazen claim that she would watch the video every July 4, for the rest of her life, was quickly mocked.
Fox News’ David Rutz and Sam Dorman contributed to this report.