If Republicans are too timid to talk about January 6, former president Donald Trump is not. “They are victims of what happened. All they were doing is protesting a rigged election,” said former president Donald Trump of the J6ers on Sunday before adding, “There has never been people treated more horrifically than J6 hostages.”
Quick to accuse Trump of dissembling, the major media were surprisingly silent about what they might normally brand as a lie. It is possible they have begun to realize that Stalinist show trials do not exactly reinforce Democrat messaging about “saving democracy.” With the media in quiet retreat, Trump supporters have the opportunity to take the offensive. To do so, they need to know some basic facts:
The provocateurs who started the action did not hear Trump speak
Trump’s speech on the Ellipse began at noon, an hour behind schedule. At about 1:10 p.m. Trump said to the crowd, “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” This is the longest quote from Trump’s speech to appear in the article of impeachment and the one most quoted by those who accuse him of inciting a riot.
By this time, however, the action was already underway at the Capitol, about a 45-minute walk from the Ellipse. At 12:53 p.m. the ubiquitous Ray Epps and his crew first breached the lightly guarded bike racks on the Capitol’s west side. At 12:58, a single individual—not yet identified—pulled down the temporary fencing protecting the lawn and with it the signs saying, “Area closed.”
The police response inflamed the protestors
At 1:06, while Trump was still speaking at the Ellipse, the Capitol Police “less lethal” team began shooting a barrage of grenades, gas, and rubber bullets into the growing mass of still-peaceful protestors on the Capitol’s west side. “That was a shooting gallery out there,” said Stan Kephart, the use-of-force expert who reviewed the video footage for the Epoch Times. “There was no tactical reason for it at all.”
Police action led to the death of three protestors
At 1:28, 56-year-old father of five, Kevin Greeson, collapsed after a Capitol Police flash bang exploded in his face. Greeson would soon die of cardiac arrest. At 2:44 p.m. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd shot and killed the unarmed Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran. At about 4:15 p.m. 34-year-old Rosanne Boyland lost consciousness when the Metropolitan Police first gassed and then pushed a mass of protestors on top of her. Once the pile cleared, MPD officer Lila Morris struck the dead or dying Boyland over the head with a branch several times. This was all captured on video. The DOJ did not investigate Boyland’s death. The House committee report does not mention her.
No Capitol Police officers died a result of the events on January 6
On January 8, citing “two law enforcement officials,” the New York Times told its readers that “pro-Trump rioters” struck Capitol Police officer Sicknick with a fire extinguisher. The Times added this chillingly fraudulent detail: “With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.”
In fact, Sickick died of natural causes on January 7. More than 100 days after his death, a Judicial Watch law suit forced the DC medical examiner to release Sicknick’s autopsy report. Sicknick died as a result of two strokes at the base of his brain stem caused by a clot, a “natural death.” Following his death on January 7, someone in authority gave the ghoulish order to make Sicknick the victim of a very specific murder. That “someone” needs to be identified.
On the second anniversary, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries repeated a by now well-worn lie, saying, “As a result of the events on January 6, the lives of five heroic officers were lost.” In the trials of the J6ers, judges or prosecutors would routinely repeat the saga of the five martyrs to provoke the jurors. In reality, of the five, one died of a stroke, and four subsequently committed suicide for reasons no one seems eager to explore.
The treatment of those arrested has been horrific
In the wake of January 6, the FBI has arrested more than 1400 citizens and incarcerated some 500 among them, the most sweeping mass injustice against American citizens by the federal government since Japanese internment.
In researching my new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, I wanted to get beyond the numbers and show the effect of the DOJ’s casual cruelty on the lives of real people. Of the ten women I profile, two were killed by police action on January 6, six have been imprisoned, and two await sentencing, one of whom is a great-grandmother. The worst offense any of the ten committed was to break a window.
The women arrested have been treated like hardened criminals. Lisa Eisenhart, a 57-year-old nurse, was kept in maximum security during her stay at the notorious DC gulag. For warmth, guards gave her a single thin blanket in a unit so cold in the morning she could see her breath. Before showers, they chained her hand and foot.
During her first two weeks in federal prison, Christine Priola, a 49-year-old occupational therapist, was confined in “the hole.” The sensory deprivation—no exercise, no TV, one book a week—would have been bad enough, but for five of her fourteen days, Christine had to share the tiny cell and its open toilet with a man, a sexual predator who claimed to be a woman.
For a single non-violent misdemeanor, Dr. Simone Gold, a 57-year-old physician and attorney, was sentenced to sixty days at the Miami Federal Detention Center, a maximum-security prison. Dr. Gold, who had a permit to speak at the Capitol on medical freedom, got swept in to the building with a crowd through open doors. Eisenhart and Priola also entered through open doors. Each of the three stayed about 15 minutes and left without touching any officers or breaking any objects. Their stories are not exceptional.
There is a two-tier justice system
The window breaker, Rachel Powell, a mother of eight from Western Pennsylvania, is now serving a 57-month sentence in a West Virginia federal prison. By contrast, Urooj Rahman, an attorney who threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of an empty NYPD patrol car, setting it on fire, was sentenced to 15 months in prison. Then, too, the hundreds of women arrested for disrupting the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing—an “official proceeding” by any measure—received $30 to $50 fines.
There is much more than can be said, especially about the evolution of the pipe bomb story and the slow walking of the request for help from the National Guard, but these issues are hard to shrink wrap into talking points. To offset any lingering nonsense about an insurrection, a quote from Ashli Babbitt’s mother, Micki Witthoeft, does nicely: “The gun-toting populous of the United States showed up that day without guns.”
Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is now available for purchase.
Although I may not have ever commented publicly on this, I have–from the very outset–believed that the DOJ, Bureau of Prisons and LE perpetrators who committed the gross injustices against the J6 protesters deserve very hard prison time–20 years at the very least, and not in a minimum security facility, but a facility for the most violent and dangerous criminals.
But the masterminds–the House Democrats (and those Republicans who served on the J6 kangaroo committee) and 7th floor FBI HQ ghouls–should be sentenced to death for their crimes against the American people. And although I am quite certain justified punishments will never happen, I am equally certain they should.
January 6 was not only NOT an insurrection, it was in fact the successful completion of a coup against Donald Trump by the Administrative State. The federal agencies responsible for securing the homeland such as the DHS, the DOD and others were no longer under his control, by design. The coup was complete and was the final stage of a diabolical plan to not only remove Trump from power, but to shut down any dissent against the manner in which it was done. It was one of the most egregious crimes ever committed by our government against its own people. From there, anyone who dared to challenge the election outcome as anything but free and fair became a target for extreme lawfare. John Eastman is one example. Craven Republicans went stone silent or threw Trump under the bus to save their own skin. A blueprint was established. Democrats are literally dismantling the Republic in an attempt to permanently oust Trump, collapse the entire populist America First movement and achieve permanent and total hegemony. We hope and pray they fall into their own trap and fail.
The injustice of this temporary world will be corrected when all stand before God under judgment.
I second your opinion.
AOC is worried that she may be jailed. However her stupidity and arrogance never morphed into a crime that rquires anything more than a defeat at the polls. On the other hand those in the Executive Branch who used their power to take away the God Given Rights of others, for zero reasons, need to be held accountable if America is ever to be looked upon as a nation where the the Rule of Law prevails for everyone… equally. At this time in America the French, Jacobin Reign of Terror, is starting to look like a time we just might be reliving. And prewar Germany is starting to share some amazing similarities.