Boston.com

3 charged after allegedly breaking into Attleboro house twice in same day looking for marijuana

Two Rhode Island men and a teenager are facing charges after allegedly breaking into an Attleboro home twice within a span of seven hours on Tuesday, according to a report from 7News Boston. 

Police were dispatched to a home on Peck Street just after 4 a.m. Tuesday after a resident called 911 and said three men had broken into the basement, the news station reported. The resident and another person who was home reportedly locked themselves in a bedroom and monitored the suspects through a live video feed from security equipment. 

The suspects fled the home before law enforcement arrived, according to a police report obtained by the news station. 

Just hours later, the suspects allegedly returned and broke into the basement once more, police said. The suspects, who were later arrested from a traffic stop in Providence, Rhode Island, based on a vehicle description released by investigators, were allegedly looking for marijuana in the home. The intruders did not steal any belongings or injure anyone in the home, 7News reported. 

One of the suspects was later found to be carrying an airsoft pistol that resembled a handgun, according to the police report obtained by 7News. The station also reported that one of the suspects is a cousin of one resident. 

Following their arrest, the suspects were identified as Jalen Ladue, 20, Asuriah Becote, 18, and a 17-year-old from Providence. All three were arrested on fugitive from justice charges. 

Police are working to obtain arrest warrants for home invasion. 

2 New England destinations just ranked among the best places to travel in 2022

A seaside city in the smallest U.S. state and a New England state known for its rocky coastline just ranked among the best destinations for travel in 2022.

Travel + Leisure named Newport, R.I,. among the 50 best places to travel in 2022, and Rough Guides named Maine among the best places to visit in the USA in 2022.

Private accommodations and fresh-air activities are what travelers are looking for in 2022, wrote Travel + Leisure, and Newport fits the bill.

“Newport is considered one of the sailing capitals of the world,” Travel + Leisure wrote, in part, about Newport. “It is home to the largest fleet of America’s Cup 12 Meter yachts, most of which are available for charter. In May, the coastal town is welcoming a Sailing Museum that is sure to solidify that title.”

Also, new hotels such as Hammett’s Hotel, Brenton Hotel, and The Wayfinder Hotel have “closed a much-needed gap for luxury accommodations,” the publication wrote.

Rough Guides described its picks as “inspiring, exhilarating, and compelling.”

“Maine more than lives up to its ‘the way life should be’ motto, not least for travellers who like to get out and about in their own time, in their own space,” Rough Guides wrote. “Its forests, lakes, and seaside settlements invite leisurely exploration, especially if you’re into food and drink.”

Speaking of which, Maine visitors are “spoiled for choice” when it comes to its many lobster shacks, according to the publication.

View the Rough Guides list of the best places to visit in the USA in 2022 and Travel + Leisure‘s the 50 best places to travel in 2022.

Why isn’t Biden’s expanded child tax credit more popular?

A significant piece of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda has come to an end. The monthly expansion of the existing child tax credit expired last month after Congress failed to extend it.

Since July, the federal government has sent the families of 61 million children monthly payments of $300 per child younger than 6, and $250 per older child. Democrats’ roughly $2 trillion Build Back Better spending bill, which would have renewed the expanded credit into this year, has not cleared Congress and may never. When the policy first passed in March, many experts hailed its potential to cut child poverty and hunger, and many Democrats hoped regular cash in families’ pockets would prove wildly popular.

But the public’s appraisal has been less glowing. While polls about last year’s expanded credit found it to be popular on net — most showed it with approval in the 50s — it lagged behind the popularity of lowering costs for prescription drugs, expanding Medicare and other policies that Democrats are seeking to pass. As the party continues to debate whether and how to resurrect the expanded credit, polls generally suggest that Americans have reservations about making it a more lasting fixture of the social safety net.

That lukewarm reception has dismayed those across the political spectrum who advocate more generous aid to families.

“I have been kind of surprised that this has not been as popular as many of us expected that it would be,” said Brad Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociologist and senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank.

Why wasn’t it? Experts offered several theories, ranging from how the credit was passed to Americans’ deeply rooted beliefs about who deserves government support.

A pandemic casualty?

One possibility is that the pandemic, which helped make the expanded credit a reality, has also limited its support. Democrats first passed the program as part of Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill, framing it as a much-needed boon in a time when most Americans said they welcomed more robust action by the federal government.

But at least so far, the pandemic does not seem to have fundamentally reordered Americans’ views about the role of government. As economic indicators improve and concerns about rising prices replace recession blues, the expanded credit may be a casualty of sliding public support for more federal help. A July Hill-HarrisX poll that described the program as a “pandemic stimulus measure” found that 60% of voters (including 47% of Democrats) thought it was “too expensive and no longer needed” compared with 40% who wanted to see it extended until 2025.

Who is it helping?

As expected, Democrats support Biden’s expanded credit at far higher rates than Republicans, with independents about evenly split, but attitudes also vary across other dimensions. While younger Americans — who are more likely to be parents receiving the credit — tend to approve of it, many older Americans do not. That could be because they tend to view new expansions of the social safety net as threats to funding for Social Security, Medicare and other programs that benefit seniors, said Andrea L. Campbell, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist who studies public opinion and social policy.

Older Americans are also less likely to take care of children, which could further explain their tepid support. Benefits that aid Americans across their entire lives tend to outpoll policies like universal prekindergarten or the expanded credit, which help Americans only when they are raising children, notes Ethan Winter, a senior analyst at the progressive think tank Data for Progress and a pollster for Fighting Chance for Families, which advocates extending the credit.

“There’s actually this nice correlation, if you look at all these items, between how long does this benefit support you during your life cycle and how popular it is,” he said.

It may also be that the credit has proved underwhelming. Parents have largely spent the money on school expenses, food and other household costs, according to a survey conducted by the Census Bureau. Yet in an NPR/Marist poll released last month, just 15% of respondents who received payments said they had helped their families “a lot” compared with 64% who said “a little.”

And although polls often find support for policies that benefit families and children, they may not be most Americans’ top priority. In a December Morning Consult/Politico survey, just 14% of voters said renewing the credit was among the most important elements of the Build Back Better spending bill. They ranked most of its other provisions — including allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices and funding for affordable housing — higher.

Who is deserving?

It is also possible that the expanded credit is struggling to overcome Americans’ deep-seated beliefs about who deserves government help and who does not. Broad evidence suggests that many are skeptical of programs that provide cash without conditions.

Parents who do not pay income taxes can access the credit. While many experts doubt the program nudges large numbers of recipients to leave the workforce, some disagree — and polling suggests that Americans overwhelmingly support work requirements for adults who receive government benefits in some or all cases. (Social Security and Medicare, nearly universal programs that Americans pay into via taxes before receiving benefits later in life, are rare exceptions, Campbell said.)

An August YouGov survey conducted for American Compass, a conservative think tank, found that increasing the value of the credit, making it available monthly and sending it to households without a working adult were all popular policy changes but that sending it to nonworking families was the least popular of the three. And most Republicans, independents and voters without a four-year college degree whose households earn between $30,000 and $80,000 did not favor permanently sending payments to nonworking families.

Proponents of the expanded credit counter that it was designed to reach a wider array of families, including those who stay at home to raise children.

“What about the grandparents that are out there taking care of kids?” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. “What about the disabled who have kids? Should they not get this?”

Yet fears that some might abuse the credit may also be sapping support for it. In focus groups organized this year by the Institute for Family Studies, Wilcox’s think tank, even some participants who stood to benefit from the credit argued that others might spend it on vacations, have more children to maximize its value or become dependent on government support.

Criticisms of unconditional benefits often stigmatize poorer Americans and single parents or are influenced by racist tropes, as with the stereotype of the “welfare queen.” Yet the skepticism appears broadly held.

“People wildly overestimate the amount of abuse and fraud in various kinds of social programs,” Campbell said. “But it just strikes people as plausible.”

Republicans, some of whom have attacked the expanded credit as “welfare,” have reinforced this notion for decades. But so have some Democrats.

“This is something that’s been in our bones for a long time,” said Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center who helped set up the Institute for Family Studies focus groups.

Those ingrained attitudes could be limiting support for Biden’s credit. They may also explain why congressional efforts to extend it have failed so far. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., whose vote is most likely needed to pass any bill to do so, holds deep reservations about the program and has floated adding work requirements.

Republicans in Congress unanimously oppose Build Back Better. While some — including Sens. Marco Rubio and Mike Lee — support a more generous child tax credit, they have criticized Biden’s expansion because it lacks work requirements. Other Republicans argue that extending the credit long-term will increase the federal deficit. And some say it has helped drive inflation higher (many economists doubt it has played a big role).

If Congress does not renew the expansion, the child tax credit will revert to its less generous, pre-Biden amount — no longer accessible to families who do not work, and no longer available as advance monthly payments rather than as an annual credit. Many experts expect poverty, which affected about 16% of children in 2020, to rise.

Polling is an imperfect gauge of public sentiment. Some Democratic pollsters have found higher levels of support for the expanded credit when it is described as a tax cut for working families. If Congress does renew the program, tailoring it to critics’ concerns could boost its popularity. Some advocates of the credit propose more narrowly targeting it to lower-income families, which some polling suggests would increase its support. Others favor a monthly cash benefit for families administered through Social Security, as Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, has proposed.

Campbell doubts tinkering is the solution.

“The public does not know policy details,” she said. “They only know broad-brush aspects of these policies. And so tweaking policies on the margin or thinking that a work requirement will make it more popular, I don’t think that’s a magic bullet.”

Alternatively, a renewed credit might gain support if more Americans came to view it as a reliable plank of the social safety net. Although all but the wealthiest families are eligible for the expanded credit, language barriers, unstable housing and other hurdles appear to have made it harder for many Hispanic and low-income households to access it. Fixing those administrative burdens could grow the program’s constituency.

Or perhaps a future political fight over the credit will reorient public opinion. The Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, did not become consistently popular until seven years later, when former President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans tried and failed to repeal it. A record number of Americans have signed up for health plans through the law for 2022.

Whether Biden’s child tax credit is renewed or not, any change in how the public feels about it will probably take time to emerge.

“We’re only a few months into what I think is a pretty large natural experiment,” Winter said. “We might just have to wait and see.”


This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

COVID-sniffing dogs to make rounds in 3 Massachusetts school districts

The Bristol County Sheriff’s Office is starting a new program to help stop the spread of COVID-19 that relies on some four-legged recruits as virus cases continue to rise around Massachusetts. 

Two trained 1-year-old labradors are being used to detect COVID-19 in schools, with the sheriff’s office hoping that sniffing out the virus in the buildings will assist in preventing transmission of the disease. 

Jonathan Darling, the public information officer for the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office, told Boston.com the program was developed with scientists from Florida International University.

“These scientists developed this program where they trained dogs that detect COVID,” Darling said.

Starting Wednesday, the two dogs, Huntah and Duke, will be working in the Freetown, Lakeville, and Norton school districts. The program is currently deployed to around 15 schools across the districts, with about two to three schools being smelled by the pups every day.

Both dogs are the first law enforcement K-9s in the United States to be trained in the detection of COVID-19’s scent, according to the sheriff’s office. Although humans cannot smell coronavirus, dogs’ noses are able to.

Although other COVID-sniffing dog programs have screened people entering events or airports, Darling said these K-9s will solely be used to scan areas and surfaces.

“Dogs are sniffing around areas where the school’s leaders need, such as gymnasiums, cafeterias, could be classrooms,” he said. “Think of places where people congregate, where there’s a lot of hands touching surfaces, things that are highly touched a lot.”

Darling did not rule out the possibility of more dogs being added to the program in the future, especially if more school districts requested the service.

“We view this as a public safety program and it’s available for free,” Darling said. “If this program expands more, where there’s more demand, we could absolutely be talking about expanding it to add another dog or another handler.”

The new Red Line train is slowly returning to passenger service

With some stops and starts, the MBTA’s first new Red Line train is getting back on track.

Officials say the sleek, six-car train set — the first of 252 new Red Line cars the MBTA plans to deliver by late 2024 — is reentering somewhat regular service, over nine months after it was pulled off the tracks to address issues that caused the slow-speed derailment of one of the agency’s new Orange Line trains in March.

The new Red Line train first returned last week, and MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said in an email Wednesday that it will begin operating on “most weekdays” this week. According to Pesaturo, the new train is expected to be in service Wednesday afternoon, Thursday, and Friday.

However, there will still be days when it won’t be in service so that train operators can be trained on the new vehicles, which are more spacious and include a number of modernized features. Pesaturo also said that emergency first responders have been training on the new cars to familiarize with the vehicles. After its brief return, the new train hadn’t been seen on the tracks since Thursday.

The MBTA also announced Wednesday that it had finished its mile-long Red Line train test track and vehicle testing facility, which officials say will help the new fleet’s fledging rollout to proceed more quickly.

The test track, which runs along South Boston Bypass Road near Broadway Station, will allow officials to test new trains without interfering with maintenance or competing regular service on mainline tracks.

They also said it will allow easier access for vehicle deliveries, which are expected to increase through 2022, as additional cars are shipped from manufacturer CRRC’s facility in Springfield.

Pesaturo said additional new Red Line cars will be delivered this winter, though “a formal production and delivery schedule is still being developed.”

Boston schools superintendent becomes substitute teacher as staffing shortages grip district

BPS Staffing Problems

With over 1,000 district staffers out, Boston Public Schools Superintendent Brenda Cassellius taught a fourth grade class on Wednesday to cover the shift of at least one of the hundreds of teachers currently away from their classrooms.

Despite the staffing woes, though, Cassellius seemed to be making the most of the experience.

“I couldn’t sleep last night I was so excited to teach,” Cassellius wrote in a tweet. “Feels like it did my first day of class.”

Approximately 1,074 BPS employees called out on Tuesday, including about 450 teachers, schools officials said. The district attributes the absences to a variety of reasons, the latest COVID-19 surge among them.

The numbers were even higher on Wednesday, with 1,100 school employees out, including 658 teachers and 300 paraprofessionals, according to a BPS spokesperson Wednesday afternoon.

Forty-seven buses were also without a driver Wednesday, according to BPS.

Officials were trying to find coverage for the Nathan Hale Elementary School in Roxbury when Cassellius decided to dust off her teaching skills.

“I jumped into gear and said, ‘I’ll clear my calendar and I’ll go over and teach a fourth grade class,'” she told reporters.

Sixty of the system’s central office staffers were deployed to cover core functions in schools in an attempt to keep schools operational and students learning in-person, officials said.

The absences are sizable: Data from late 2019, the most recent available, indicated BPS budgeted a staff of 10,380 for the 2020 school year, meaning roughly 1 in 10 employees was out on Tuesday.

Mayor Michelle Wu, appearing on GBH’s “Greater Boston” that night, said the city is working closely with state officials about the potential to have BPS shift into remote learning, if the situation requires that.

The state is currently requiring all schools to operate in-person to meet instructional hours this school year.

Right now, should a school have to shut down due to staffing shortages, BPS would have to treat it essentially as a snow day and make up the day later on, Wu said.

Asked if BPS is ready to transition to remote learning if necessary, Wu acknowledged the district would have “a significant amount of work to do.”

“We’ve been through this over previous school years, but between the devices (and) the family engagement, there’s a lot of work in changing over,” Wu said.

Cassellius on Wednesday appeared to be covering for fourth grade teacher Johnathan Holden, who, she said, “left excellent plans and he made it so easy.”

“Full class of brilliant, amazing students. So engaged,” Cassellius wrote in another tweet Wednesday morning. “We are working on poetry and fluency. The students are so eager to learn.”

She added a message to Holden: “The kids miss you and say you are the best teacher!!!”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include Wednesday’s employee absence numbers.

Worker on snowmobile at Mass. ski resort struck, killed by snow groomer

HANCOCK, Mass. (AP) — A worker at a Massachusetts ski resort died when the snowmobile she was on was struck by a snow groomer that was backing up, authorities said Wednesday.

The death of Kimberlee Francoeur, 30, of Lanesborough, at the Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in Hancock late Tuesday morning appears to be accidental, according to a statement from the office of Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington.

The death remains under investigation and an autopsy is scheduled.

According to witness statements, Francoeur was working as a snowmaker and the snowmobile she was operating was stopped on the mountain when the snow groomer operator backed into her.

Emergency responders attempted to save Francoeur’s life but she was pronounced dead at the scene, the district attorney’s office said.

“Our entire staff is deeply shaken and our primary concern now is with the individual’s family and friends,” Tyler Fairbank, president of the Fairbank Group, which owns and operates the ski resort, told The Berkshire Eagle.

Jiminy Peak, which opened in 1948, calls itself the largest ski and snowboard resort in southern New England, and offers activities year-round. It has more than 40 trails and nine lifts, but 17 trails and five lifts are currently in operation.

Mayor Wu says Long Island is ‘full of potential’ but still a long-term option for Mass. & Cass

Mayor Michelle Wu said her administration is focusing on how to best utilize Long Island in Boston’s efforts to address the ongoing humanitarian emergency at Mass. and Cass, which has exploded in recent years as the epicenter of the overlapping crises of addiction, mental health, and homelessness in the city. 

Mass. and Cass

Wu and a group of city officials and advisors visited the island in Boston Harbor on Tuesday and toured the existing buildings that previously served as part of a recovery campus. The facility shuttered in 2014 when the Long Island Bridge was determined to be structurally unsound and closed. 

The loss of beds at the 400,000-square-foot campus and demolition of the bridge have been cited in the ensuing years by officials as being one of the primary drivers of the worsening situation around Mass. and Cass.

“It is full of potential,” Wu said during a press briefing after the visit to the old campus.

She said many of the buildings on the island are dilapidated; some facilities had functional heating systems while others did not. 

“You could see how quick the evacuation was of the island in the hours when that took place,” Wu said. “So the island and its buildings will be a medium- to long-term push that we’re making. But it is a lot of space out there.”

Since last year, Wu has expressed the belief that Long Island is not an immediate fix to the urgent crisis at Mass. and Cass.

Wu emphasized on Tuesday that the visit to the island was part of an ongoing citywide audit of city properties to identify space for services and housing.

“This will fit together with our comprehensive look, and once those pieces are sorted out, this will be in the timescale of months and years,” she said.

Wu announced plans last month to more immediately get people out of the encampments around Mass. and Cass by expanding low-threshold supportive housing sites in the city. She said her administration expects that by Jan. 12, new transitional housing for more than 150 people would be available at several sites in the city, including at the Roundhouse Hotel and the Shattuck Hospital Campus.

As part of that expansion, Wu set Jan. 12 as a deadline for getting people living unsheltered around Mass. and Cass to be connected to appropriate temporary housing and services. The city previously said any tents remaining in the area after Jan. 12 will be subjected to encampment protocols implemented by former acting Mayor Kim Janey in November.

But asked about the Jan. 12 deadline on Tuesday, Wu did not provide details about what would happen to any remaining tents. 

Instead, she stressed that outreach teams with the Boston Public Health Commission have been “on the ground” every day working to get people connected to services and housing. She said the city has identified housing for 75 percent of the people outreach workers have been in contact with, and that 49 individuals had been placed into supportive housing units as of Tuesday.

Tents have been coming down as people have been placed, and those outreach efforts will be ramped up, she said.

“January 12th was a date by which we believed we would have enough housing available to house everybody we’ve been working with there,” Wu said. “That continues to be the timeline that we’re working on. But it’s not going to be an on-and-off switch where one day everyone will still be living in encampments and the next day everyone will have disappeared. This is a day-by-day, hour-by-hour conversation, 24 hours around the clock.”

On Tuesday, Wu said she didn’t have details about what specific services could be established on Long Island, what populations would be best served on a campus there, or how much re-establishing the campus might cost. 

How people would get to the facilities also needs to be assessed, since Boston’s efforts to rebuild the bridge remain tied up in legal challenges from the City of Quincy and the Chaubunagungamaug Nipmuck Tribe, both of which oppose a new bridge to the island. 

Wu said she hasn’t yet met with Quincy Mayor Tom Koch, but said her administration has been in “close communication with leaders of indigenous communities.”

“We know that Long Island is a sacred space for the indigenous community and when we get to the point when there might be deeper conversations about the use of the island, we’ll make sure to prioritize outreach and make sure the appropriate nations are in those conversations with us,” she said.

Chris Walker, Koch’s chief of staff, told WBUR that Quincy is willing to work with Boston but still remains firmly opposed to a bridge.

“Our issues have never been about the use of the island,” Walker told the station. “We felt from day one that something could be discussed and worked out, and that uses of the island could see their potential utilized via water transportation.”

Wu said “everything is on the table” when it comes to examining what the most feasible means of transportation to the island may be, from ferries to a bridge to other options like helicopters.

But as her team brainstorms the future of Long Island, she said she, and they, remained focused on the short-term as well. 

“We are working very quickly on the urgent crisis at Mass. and Cass with actions that will continue to ramp up through next week and beyond,” she said. “We’re already evaluating medium- and long-term options. Long Island is one big piece of that, along with all of the other city-owned buildings and properties that we have.”

Citing danger to freshwater, scientists say we need to put brakes on road salts

Every winter, de-icing salts – sodium chloride, calcium chloride and magnesium chloride – battle icy roads nationwide. The effort is epic in scope: Hundreds of millions of gallons of salty substances are sprayed on roads and billions of pounds of rock salt are spread on their surfaces each year. That may lead to safer roads, but it has a real effect on the planet. In a review in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, a group of environmental scientists looked at the hazards of salts that make driving safer.

De-icing salts end up in bodies of fresh water, contaminating lakes and streams and building up in wetlands. The Environmental Protection Agency’s thresholds are not high enough to protect life in freshwater, the scientists write, and “there is also an urgent need to understand how freshwater organisms respond to novel chemical cocktails generated from road salt salinization.”

Then there’s drinking water.

When the researchers reviewed the scientific literature, they found that in many cases, drinking water salinity levels outstrip federal thresholds. The salt isn’t the only problem: Salts also increase the amount of elements such as cadmium, lead and even radium in groundwater. And because brackish drinking water can corrode plumbing, de-icing is linked to leaching of metals such as lead into the water supply in places such as Flint, Mich.

There may not be a way to end the use of de-icing salts, the researchers concede. But they say that with proper storage, mindful equipment calibration and different de-icing methods, such as pre-wetting roads or spraying salt brines before there’s ice on the ground, salts’ environmental impacts can be reduced.

One of the simplest solutions may also be the hardest to achieve. The public may need to “consider that our expectations during the winter may come at the cost of contaminating freshwater ecosystems.”

Is the public prepared to trade completely clear roads for cleaner water? It won’t be an easy choice. Either way, the “magnitude of the road salt contamination issue is substantial and requires immediate attention,” says the study’s lead author, Bill Hintz of the University of Toledo, in a news release.

Trump cancels Jan. 6 news conference at Mar-a-Lago, blames media, House committee investigating attack on Capitol

Former president Donald Trump has canceled the news conference he planned to hold on Jan. 6 to mark the first anniversary of the attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters.

In a statement released Tuesday by his Save America PAC, Trump blamed the media and the bipartisan congressional committee that is investigating the attack. Trump’s lawyers are fighting the panel’s efforts to obtain his records.

“In light of the total bias and dishonesty of the January 6th Unselect Committee of Democrats, two failed Republicans, and the Fake News Media, I am canceling the January 6th Press Conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, and instead will discuss many of those important topics at my rally on Saturday, January 15th, in Arizona-It will be a big crowd!” Trump said.

The former president had been planning to speak at his private Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida on Thursday night.

According to a person familiar with the matter, Trump wanted to make a scene and deride reporters at the event but had been told repeatedly by his advisers that it could be the kind of coverage he doesn’t want. Trump also did not know exactly what he wanted his message to be, and his team was taken aback by how many reporters were planning on attending, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

“It was going to be awful, awful press,” a Trump adviser said. The adviser, who was not authorized to speak publicly about deliberations surrounding the event, said Trump had originally announced the news conference on a lark and without a plan in place.

A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was launched by a mob trying to stop the confirmation of Joe Biden’s electoral college win. It resulted in five deaths and injured about 140 members of law enforcement.

In his statement, Trump perpetuated his widely debunked claim that the 2020 election was stolen, the false allegation that spurred many of his supporters to invade the Capitol.

“This is the Democrats’ Great Cover-Up Committee and the Media is complicit,” Trump said, adding, “Why is the primary reason for the people coming to Washington D.C., which is the fraud of the 2020 Presidential Election, not the primary topic of the Unselect Committee’s investigation? This was, indeed, the Crime of the Century.”

In recent days, some Senate Republicans had voiced unease about Trump’s plans for a news conference on the anniversary of the attack.

“Hopefully his comments will be helpful, not harmful,” Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Tuesday.