Trump deflects blame for silence on Jan. 6 and says he would have ...

The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge,” Trump said of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in a 45-minute interview with The Washington Post. He was described by advisers as excited about the event.Trump, speaking Wednesday afternoon at his palatial beachfront club, said he did not regret urging the crowd to come to Washington with a tweet stating that it would “be wild!” He also stood by his incendiary and false rhetoric about the election at the Ellipse rally before the rioters stormed the Capitol. “I said peaceful and patriotic,” he said, omitting other comments that he made in a speech that day.In fact, Trump said he deserved more credit for drawing such a large crowd to the Ellipse — and that he pressed to march on the Capitol with his supporters but was stopped by his security detail. He also blamed the D.C. mayor, whose advisers furiously tried to reach Trump’s team that day.“The former president’s desperate lies aside, the speaker was no more in charge of the security of the U.S. Capitol that day than Mitch McConnell,” said Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi.Trump said he had not been contacted by the Jan. 6 committee and added that he didn’t know what he would do if he were. He has repeatedly invoked executive privilege in a bid to block the committee from seeing documents.He said the committee’s interview with his daughter Ivanka Trump for eight hours this week was a “shame and harassment,” though he insisted he did not know what she had told the members. They declined, Trump said.Trump said he had not destroyed any call logs from the afternoon of Jan. 6 and took part in no phone calls on “burner phones,” even though there is a large gap in his White House phone logs. “Come back later,” he hollered after him.Trump also delved into foreign policy, lashing into NATO for not doing more to help Ukraine — Trump has repeatedly lampooned the organization — and said he’d threatened NATO leaders during a 2018 meeting in Brussels, a notion his advisers denied vigorously at the time.“A lot of people are a little bit surprised, I think they’re very impressed with Ukraine, but they’re not impressed with what NATO is doing, because a lot of people think NATO could be doing more,” Trump said, speaking in general terms.When asked whether he had changed his mind on Ukraine, a country he regularly criticized as president, he began speaking about his impeachment trial that was launched after he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden’s son Hunter Biden and find an email server.“I liked Zelensky from the beginning for one reason. “You’ll see,” he said.Trump said it was true he had told advisers that his health would factor into whether he would run again in 2024 but that he was currently in good health.“You always have to talk about health. That’s not good when they use the word again,” he said.“I don’t want to comment on running, but I think a lot of people are going to be very happy by my decision," he said, adding: "Because it’s a little boring now.”