WASHINGTON (AP) What insurrection ?

Flouting all evidence and their own first-hand experience, a small but growing number of Republican lawmakers are propagating a false portrayal of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol , brazenly arguing that the rioters who used flagpoles as weapons, brutally beat police officers and chanted that they wanted to hang Vice President Mike Pence were somehow acting peacefully in their violent bid to overturn Joe Biden s election.

One Republican at a hearing Wednesday called the rioters a mob of misfits. Another compared them to tourists. And a third suggested the sweeping federal investigation into the riot which has yielded more than 400 arrests and counting amounts to a national campaign of harassment.

Its a turn of events that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , another target of the rioters, called appalling and sick, and it raises the possibility that the publics understanding of the worst domestic attack on Congress in 200 years an attack that was captured extensively on video could become distorted by the same kinds of disinformation that fueled former President Donald Trump s false claims of a stolen election . It was the lie about the election that motivated the rioters in the first place.