WASHINGTON — The No. 2 official in New Hampshire on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign told police to kill themselves in an expletive-ridden Jan. 6 video shot close to the U.S. Capitol, according to a recording posted this month by an X account associated with the “Sedition Hunters,” a group of online sleuths who have helped authorities identify hundreds of people present that day.
“If you are a police officer and are going to abide by unconstitutional bulls—, I want you to do me a favor right now and go hang yourself, because you’re a piece of s—,” Dylan Quattrucci, the deputy state director of Trump’s campaign in New Hampshire, says in the video. “Go f— yourself.”
Four officers who responded to the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, later died by suicide. The Justice Department determined this month that one of the officers, Jeffrey Smith, died in the line of duty as part of a process that awards survivor benefits to his widow.
Two people who are familiar with Quattrucci confirmed to NBC News that the man in the video is him. The video shows him wearing the same outfit he was wearing in tweets he posted that day that were first surfaced by WMUR-TV of Manchester.
While the Capitol is in the background behind him, there is no evidence that he entered the building.
Trump has made defense of law enforcement a central tenet of his political identity, despite his supporters’ attack on police after the 2020 election. He has also portrayed the mob at the Capitol as patriots and said he would pardon a “large portion” of those convicted of crimes related to the riot.
Polls show he has a wide lead in the race for New Hampshire’s delegates to the Republican National Convention, as he does across the country.
Quattrucci did not respond to a phone call and a text message seeking comment. Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s spokesman, did not provide a comment about the video and whether Quattrucci still works for the campaign.
In a separate YouTube video, Quattrucci talks about members of Congress who were locked down because of the riot.
“This is nuts, this is history, this is America, we love our president, let’s gooooo!” he says in the video.
The photo pinned at the top of Quattrucci’s account on X, the social media platform long known as Twitter, is one of him with Trump at a New Hampshire campaign office on June 27.
Campaign finance records show that he began working for the Trump campaign in May and made $6,500 in June, the last month for which spending disclosures have been made available.
Quattrucci was an aide on the unsuccessful 2022 congressional campaign of Karoline Leavitt, who now works for a Trump-aligned political action committee. Leavitt did not respond to a text message seeking an interview about Quattrucci.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
