Donald Trump's nominee for governor in Pennsylvania compared the Jan. 6 attack to the 1933 Reichstag fire.
There was a man at the U.S. Capitol.
The House has subpoenaed Mastriano. According to receipts his campaign's lawyer acknowledged giving to the committee, he organized buses to D.C. that day.
His primary election victory last month has led to a renewed look at his role on January 6, when he was in the back of a crowd that broke a police barricade.
Increased attention is being given to his comments about January 6.
Mastriano was live-streamed on Facebook as he was interviewed by Ben Stein.
Stein, a former Richard Nixon speech writer who hosted the 1990s gameshow "Win Ben Stein's Money" and played an economics teacher in the 1986 movie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", called the January 6 attack "a ridiculously trivial thing."
Stein compared the country's current state to the 1933 fire on the Reichstag in Berlin that Hitler blamed on communists. Civil liberties were suspended by the Nazis because of the fire.
Stein said that the Nazis immediately imposed emergency measures. I think this is related to the January 6 non event.
Stein said the riot was a trivial thing.
He said that it was not a rebellion. It wasn't an effort to take over the government. It was a demonstration by a group of people who were frustrated by the impossibility of the vote having gone the Democrats' way.
Mastriano said he agreed with Stein's comparison of the Reichstag fire to the Jan 6 one.
"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." I see similarities.
Law enforcement had taken "extreme, heavy-handed measures" in response to the attack, according to Mastriano.
"It's heartbreaking to see how quickly our country is falling down, and that we have people being publicly arrested for show to send a message." McCarthy in the '50s looks like an amateur now that we're seeing it.
A member of the online sleuths Sedition Hunters, who have spent the past 17 months investigating the Jan. 6 attack and identifying hundreds of rioters to law enforcement, says they have found new photos of Mastriano on the Capitol grounds. The online sleuths have constructed timelines based on the videos, photos, press coverage and social media posts of the day and the window of the Capitol rotunda was smashed by rioters minutes later.
The FBI has used online sleuths to identify Capitol rioters months before their arrest.
NBC News looked at the videos and images used to create the timelines and compared them with the images identified by the sleuths. Mastriano is wearing the same scarf and hat and is in the same spot in the crowd. Mastriano has acknowledged that his wife was with him that day, and in the images he is accompanied by a woman who appears to be his wife. He has always been identified in previous pictures.
The images, shared with NBC News, appear to show Mastriano holding up his cellphone as rioters in the front of the mob face off with police. Reconstructed timelines and other videos show rioters breaching the police line within minutes, ripping away the rope line and rushing past officers up the stairs. The timelines and videos were reviewed by NBC News.
There is a video posted by "Stop the Steal" that appears to show a man taking a photo or video with his cellphone as rioters face off with police on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. The mobbroke through four layers of security at the Capitol building.
Mastriano's campaign didn't reply to NBC News' request for comment He said that he never stepped foot on the Capitol stairs and that he respected all police lines. According to NBC, one of his campaign aides was near the mob. He has insisted that he did not enter the Capitol that day.
The Democratic candidate for governor in Pennsylvania is Josh Shapiro.
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