DOTHAN, Ala. — This week, WDHN’s Ilyana Capellan spoke with Rep. Barry Moore on some of the political upheavals he’s seen in Washington, D.C. since 2021 began.
You can read his full interview below or watch it in the video above.
Just a few months into his congressional term in DC, Representative Barry Moore has already seen history unfold in front of his eyes. Representative Moore, you were in D.C. for the violence that incited at the Capitol building. Can you tell me more about what that experience was like?
“Well, yeah it was a heck of a first day on the job. For those of us who had to get out and contest delegates. But actually, I went signed the documents the resolution earlier that morning and headed back to my office and , I got back to my office at Longworth when we got a lockdown notice that we had to kind of shelter in place at Longworth at our particular office for about 11 hours. I could see the protesters are the people you know outside my windows but I I never felt threatened at all where I was at.
President Trump’s social media platforms have quickly begun to be suspended. and you deleted your personal Twitter account after posting tweets, including one that had said “I understand it was a black police officer that shot the white female veteran. You know, that doesn’t fit the narrative.” What narrative were you referring to in that tweet?
“Right, well the key that was narrative. You know, all year long we watched the people stoke these riots because the police officer shooting unarmed citizens. and so my concern was the narrative how the… I wasn’t concerned so much of who was the officer was or even who was shot. but the fact that the particular people that we saw there in the building were getting condemned, and the police officers were being called out, and I think they did what they had to do, but it was just concerning to me that they had used at all years to stoke riots, and all of a sudden they changed, and they just kind of decided it wasn’t worth reporting.”
And continuing with that fallout from the riots that has caused President Trump’s second impeachment during his term, do you think he should have been blamed for the violence that ensued? I know he has some supporters that are still to this day supporting him. You know, you were one of his first true supporters, but then on the other side, he has some Republicans that also voted for his impeachment. How and where do you fall with this?
“Well, you know I, I don’t think if you look at the timeline, he was still speaking when the National Guard was called to the building. … There’s a 40-minute walk from where his stage was to down to to the Capitol building so it was hard to say that he actually incited a riot, and we actually had a letter put into the record that I did last night by Representative Davidson that said, the FBI had warned us 24 hours before there could be a potential problem. So, if you look at it that way, there’s no way that what he did, probably incited those riots. … If we’re going to condemn one person, then we need to condemn Kamala Harris for her comments she made at Nancy Pelosi. Obviously, there’s been Democrat after Democrat for the last 48 months (that) have stoked the fires of unrest and unlawful protest, and it’s just It’s unfortunate now that he’s being blamed for something that they’ve been doing for 48 months.
These supporters in these protests that we saw ensue last week, though, were those more Democratic or Republican, or do you think that this is just not political at all?
“You know, I don’t really know and we haven’t. That’s the thing. The investigation really is just getting started so we don’t know who was behind him. I can’t say for sure if it was one party or the other. The other I know I was briefed that morning, Wednesday morning, early before anything started. One of my friends in the colleagues in the legislature said that we have ANTIFA people putting on Trump shirts. At the time that didn’t make any sense to me, because I said, why would they want to crowd are looking any bigger, so it sounds like there may have been some mixed in, but we don’t have any proof. Nobody, no arrests have been made and identified necessarily that they are one crowd or the other. It’s just unfortunate. When you break the law, you must be arrested. I don’t care what color your t-shirt is or what your hat looks like.”
