FORMER US PRESIDENT Donald Trump decried a congressional probe into the riot by his supporters last year at the US Capitol as a “mockery of justice” yesterday.

In a rambling, 12-page statement, Trump said that instead of focusing on the country’s larger problems, the Democratic-led panel was “a Kangaroo Court, hoping to distract the American people from the great pain they are experiencing.”

The former US leader also reiterated the same conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election that earlier in the day the congressional probe had argued were a key motivating factor for his supporters to riot.

“Democrats created the narrative of January 6th to detract from the much larger and more important truth that the 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen,” Trump, who turned 76 today, said in the statement.

Trump, fuming that the committee was one-sided in its approach, said the panel “is making a mockery of justice.”

As part of yesterday’s televised hearing, the congressional panel — which is composed of seven Democrats and two Republicans — showed videos in which former aides to Trump testified that they repeatedly told the president that his assertions of widespread fraud in the election were false.

“When I went into this and would tell him how crazy some of these allegations were, there was never an indication of interest in the actual facts,” former US attorney general Bill Barr said in testimony revealed yesterday, as he likened addressing Trump’s avalanche of false allegations with playing the game “whack-a-mole.”

“I was demoralized because I thought, boy… he’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” Barr told the House committee.

The panel is holding six hearings throughout June to outline its case that the riot at the seat of US democracy in Washington was the culmination of a seven-step conspiracy by Trump and his inner circle to overturn his defeat to Joe Biden.

Trump ignored repeated warnings from top aides against falsely claiming the November 2020 election was stolen, according to testimony unveiled by the panel.

“We will tell the story of how Donald Trump lost the election — and knew he lost the election — and as a result of his loss, decided to wage an attack on our democracy,” the committee’s Democratic chairman Bennie Thompson said in his opening remarks.

The committee ended its hearing yesterday with videos of Trump supporters on 6 January, 2021, repeating his theories of fraud in the election, shortly before a mob descended on the Capitol.

But Trump doubled down on his debunked election lie in his statement.

“The truth is that Americans showed up in Washington, DC in massive numbers… on January 6th, 2021, to hold their elected officials accountable for the obvious signs of criminal activity throughout the Election,” Trump said.

Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney, said Trump chose to listen to the advice of “apparently inebriated” former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani “to just claim he won, and insist that the vote counting stop — to falsely claim everything was fraudulent.”

Trump started pushing what came to be known as his “Big Lie” around 2:30am on 4 November, 2020, prematurely declaring victory on the night of an election he ultimately lost to Biden by seven million votes.

Barr said in his testimony that Trump claimed major fraud “right out of the box on election night… before there was actually any potential of looking at evidence.”