WASHINGTON — The Donald Trump-endorsed nominee for Pennsylvania governor compared the Jan. 6 attack to historical events staged by Nazis, responding to a question by saying that he saw ‘parallels’ between the response to the Jan. 6 attack and the 1933 Reichstag fire, which Adolf Hitler used to seize additional power.
Doug Mastriano was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Mastriano, a Pennsylvania state senator, has been subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 committee. He organized buses to D.C. that day, according to receipts his campaign's lawyer previously acknowledged turning over to the Jan. 6 committee. Video shows he was just feet away as rioters ripped down police barricades, but he has said he followed police lines “as they existed” and says he left the Capitol when it was “apparent that this was no longer a peaceful protest.”
His primary election victory last month has prompted a renewed look at his role on Jan. 6, including previously unpublished photos that show him in the back of a crowd that breached a police barricade.
He is also receiving increased attention about his comments about Jan. 6.
Last week, Mastriano live-streamed on Facebook as he was interviewed for the podcast "The World According To Ben Stein."
Stein — a former Richard Nixon speechwriter who hosted the 1990s gameshow "Win Ben Stein's Money" and played an economics teacher in the 1986 movie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" — while speaking Friday on the podcast, called the deadly Jan. 6 attack "a ridiculously trivial thing."
Stein said the country is getting "more and more into a dictatorship," and compared Jan. 6 to the Reichstag fire, a fire on the legislative branch in Berlin in 1933 that Hitler blamed on communists. The Nazis then used the fire as a pretext to suspend civil liberties and take more power.
"The Nazis immediately seized upon [the Reichstag fire] to impose emergency measures," Stein said. "I think something like this is happening with the Jan. 6 non-event."
Stein called the riot a "ridiculously trivial thing."
“It was not an insurrection," he added. "It was not an attempt to take over the government. It was a demonstration by a group that felt frustration by the statistical impossibility of the vote having gone the way the Democrats said it did
Mastriano responded to Stein's comparison, saying he concurred with the comparison between Jan. 6 and the Reichstag fire.
“I agree with the political, with the historic analogy laid out there, so using something that was very suspicious in Berlin to advance their agenda, you know, the national socialists there," Mastriano said. "I do see parallels.”
Mastriano, who previously said that those who broke the law on Jan. 6 "must be prosecuted," said in Stein's podcast that law enforcement had taken "extreme, heavy-handed measures" in response to the attack.