President Donald Trump’s pick to oversee the Bureau of Labor Statistics was hanging around the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, footage shows, prompting a panicked scramble from the White House to paint him as a mere bystander.
The president announced that he was nominating Heritage Foundation economist and Project 2025 architect E.J. Antoni to replace the previous stats chief, whom Trump abruptly fired after receiving several months of weak jobs data.
The choice to appoint a MAGA hardliner to a position that requires nonpartisan professional analysis sparked immediate fears that BLS data will no longer be reliable if the Senate confirms Antoni.
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Adding to those partisan concerns, it turns out Antoni—who also happens to have a giant picture of Adolf Hitler’s favorite battleship hanging in his office—was at the Capitol on the day a mob of Trump supporters violently tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Video from the social media website Parler, archived by ProPublica, shows Antoni walking through the crowd on the west side of the Capitol grounds at about 1:50 p.m. Other footage shows Antoni on the east side of the building, walking away from it.
At the time, the crowd had removed police barricades and surrounded the building, but had not yet entered. Police were struggling to hold off the mob from taking over the inauguration platform, NBC News reported.
Reached by NBC, Antoni declined to comment.
A White House official told the outlet that he was in Washington that day for meetings at an office that was blocks away from the Capitol, and had wandered over after seeing coverage on the news. He did not cross any barricades or participate in any demonstrations, the official said.
“These pictures show EJ Antoni, a bystander to the events of January 6th, observing and then leaving the Capitol area,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told NBC in a statement. “EJ was in town for meetings, and it is wrong and defamatory to suggest EJ engaged in anything inappropriate or illegal.”
That would suggest that some of the J6 rioters did do something “inappropriate or illegal,” which the Trump administration has long denied. On his first day in office, Trump ended the Department of Justice investigation into the attack—which a bipartisan Senate report found was linked to seven deaths—and either pardoned or commuted the sentences of all 1,500 defendants.
Prosecutors had scoured video evidence to identify and charge participants who entered the Capitol or encouraged the mob from outside.
Antoni may have indeed been a mere bystander at the Capitol, but his commitment to Trump was on display this week when he suggested a novel way for dealing with bad jobs numbers: getting rid of monthly jobs reports altogether.
Economists—including former Republican officials—called the proposal a “disastrously bad idea.”
