(NEXSTAR) – President-elect Joe Biden tweeted Thursday that the rioters who stormed the Capitol Wednesday would have been treated “very differently” than Black Lives Matter protesters, who have been demonstrating widely since the May police killing of George Floyd.
“No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protestors yesterday that they wouldn’t have been treated very differently than the mob that stormed the Capitol,” Biden tweeted. “We all know that’s true — and it’s unacceptable.”
Earlier Thursday, former First Lady Michelle Obama released a statement saying her “heart had fallen harder and faster than I can remember” after witnessing the violence.
“The day was a fulfillment of the wishes of an infantile and unpatriotic president who can’t handle the truth of his own failures,” she wrote.
Obama also drew comparison to the police response to Black Lives Matter protesters. She called the protests “an overwhelmingly peaceful movement” and noted that “in city after city, day after day, we saw peaceful protesters met with brute force.”
“We saw cracked skulls and mass arrests, law enforcement pepper spraying its way through a peaceful demonstration for a presidential photo op,” she wrote.
On Wednesday, Biden denounced the rioters who incited violence at the Capitol and called for the restoration of “just simple decency.”
“At this hour our democracy is under unprecedented assault unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times,” Biden said, adding that what unfolded was, “an assault on the rule of law like few times we have ever seen it.”
He said the uprising bordered on sedition, adding, “The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are.”