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President Donald Trump’s nominee to replace the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) head he fired this month was present in the militant right-wing mob outside of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, NBC has found.
Archived footage of the attack shows the nominee, E.J. Antoni, in the crowd on the west side of the Capitol about an hour after the mob dismantled the police barricades at 1 p.m. that afternoon, around the time when rioters were breaching the building.
NBC’s Ryan J. Reilly reports that the footage appears to show Antoni leaving the area as rioters begin to breach police barricades, and that he does not enter the building. Footage from social media website Parler, archived by ProPublica, and released by the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, also shows Antoni there, the publication found.
In the Parler video, Antoni is deep in the crowd and walking away from the building, wearing a red varsity jacket.
The White House claims that Antoni was in the area because he was attending a meeting at his employer’s office nearby, and had only walked over as a “bystander.”
“EJ was in town for meetings, and it is wrong and defamatory to suggest EJ engaged in anything inappropriate or illegal,” the White House says, even though NBC’s article does not suggest that Antoni had broken the law.
Trump has granted a blanket pardon for those charged with crimes related to the deadly January 6 riot.
“Completely disqualifying,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) of Antoni’s presence at the Capitol attack on social media.
Antoni, who has been criticized by the left, center, and right for his extremely partisan views, still needs to be confirmed by the Senate in order to lead the agency.
Trump previously withdrew a nominee for U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. after Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) took issue with the nominee’s moves to defend January 6 participants as the interim pick for the job. However, the Senate also recently confirmed a January 6 conspiracy theorist to lead the National Counterterrorism Center.
Even if he wasn’t an active part of the mob, Antoni has previously cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Moreover, he is the top economist for the Heritage Foundation — which has spread vast amounts of disinformation about the 2020 election. It’s also the group behind Project 2025, to which Antoni was a contributor.
Antoni’s position in the right-wing group, as well as his history of unfounded accusations that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is biased against the right, has raised alarm for experts across the political spectrum — especially after Trump fired the previous bureau head, Erika McEntarfer, for openly partisan reasons.
Objectivity and accuracy in Bureau of Labor Statistics data is critical to the credibility of the U.S.’s economy on an international scale, and key for decision-making domestically.
When firing McEntarfer, Trump effectively said that lower-than-expected job numbers were proof that the figures were “rigged” because they didn’t make him look good — strongly suggesting that he would only accept numbers as “accurate” if they showed growth under his policies, regardless of whether the data reflects reality.
Experts familiar with Antoni’s work have said that he is an exceptionally partisan pick, even for a president who is infamous for demanding unbending loyalty. He’s already suggested, for instance, that the agency suspend its monthly jobs reports until its methods can be “fixed.”
“From selectively presenting data from particularly convenient dates to misrepresenting axes to exaggerate magnitudes, he has used all the tricks in the book and shown time and again that he is not a credible source of information,” Dave Hebert, research fellow for the conservative American Institute for Economic Research, told The Guardian. “Worse, he has repeatedly shown that he fundamentally misunderstands what some of the data the BLS puts out actually means.”
“I have no problem with someone who supports President Trump, but we cannot afford such a partisan person who has neither the credibility nor the ability to generate believable data,” Hebert went on.
Meanwhile, the shocks to the U.S. economy — including the job market — due to Trump’s hot-and-cold tariff policy, the GOP’s massive cuts to the social safety net, slashes to federal grants, and more, are just starting to materialize, reports have found.
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