It took chutzpah for Donald Trump to pardon the Jan. 6 Capitol riot defendants and use up a big chunk of his finite political capital to do the right thing, against the advice of polite Washington.?
That so many people still don’t understand that it was the right thing to do is a product of a sophisticated and Machiavellian four-year propaganda campaign led by the Democratic Party’s biggest liars, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin, and their tame GOP patsy Liz Cheney.
As much as the pardons right the wrongs against individual defendants, they also are a repudiation of the J6 prosecutions and the entire weaponized legal apparatus under Joe Biden.
Before delving into the injustice and Stasi-like harassment of 1,500 J6 defendants that drove at least five to suicide, it’s worth looking at the absurdity of the wider case.
‘Sedition hunters’
Of all the crimes and threats to the United States — terrorism, organized crime, drug trafficking, espionage, drone attacks — why was a four-hour riot in Washington, DC, singled out by the DOJ and FBI to be the biggest investigation in their history? Bigger than 9/11, bigger than Enron.?
The J6 riots did $1.5 million damage to the Capitol compared to $2 billion in damage caused by the BLM-Antifa George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020. Not to mention 25 deaths and countless injured cops.?
With thousands of FBI and DOJ personnel mobilized to hunt down every Trump supporter who set foot on Capitol grounds, the cost of the J6 prosecutions has been immense, even with the free labor of malicious self-styled citizen “sedition hunters.”
An extra $780 million was allocated to the FBI and the DC US Attorney’s Office just in 2022 for J6 cases, which they were working on right up until Trump’s inauguration. The full cost over four years has yet to be calculated, but the opportunity cost was equally high. For example, FBI whistleblower Steve Friend says he was taken off child sexual abuse cases to investigate J6.?
How many children have been abused, terrorist plots hatched, assassinations planned, or criminal gangs flourished while the FBI was looking the other way at some phantom threat of “domestic conservative terrorism,” whether J6ers, parents at school board meetings, pro-lifers, or Catholics at Latin Mass.
The J6 preoccupation was extreme overreach for a riot in which the only person killed was an unarmed female protester, Ashli Babbitt, shot by a trigger-happy Capitol Police officer with a troubling disciplinary record.
For all the effort Biden and the media put in to depict the riot as an “insurrection,” nobody was charged with that specific crime despite egregious overcharging by federal prosecutors. The Dems’ rhetorical fiction was too much of a stretch even for them.
Biden lied nonstop about the day, insisting that Officer Brian Sicknick “was killed defending the Capitol,” even though an autopsy found Sicknick had died the next day of a stroke and had no injuries on his body.
Of course, the reason for the legal overreach was political, the fruit of a president who broke every norm to weaponize the justice system against his political enemies and manipulate it to protect his own corruption.
From the minute he took office, Biden made J6 the centerpiece of his presidency. He used it vengefully to set up a division between MAGA “deplorables” and the rest of the country.
Dressed up as protecting “democracy,” J6 became a key plank of the Democrats’ narrative and Biden’s ill-fated re-election bid. It provided the pretext and justification for the lawfare against Trump.
The strategy failed, much to the befuddlement of Democrats who still are reeling from their crushing defeat at the hands of the man they thought they had killed off, figuratively and almost literally.
In that sense, it was poetic justice that one of Trump’s first acts on reclaiming the presidency, on the very day of his inauguration, was to pardon all J6 defendants, apart from 14 whose sentences he commuted.
Democrats have been hyperventilating all week.
‘Treated unfairly’
Inconveniently for them, Biden pulled the moral high ground out from under them with self-serving pardons for his family for any crimes committed over a suspiciously precise 11-year period and preemptive pardons for Cheney, the J6 committee and various other malefactors.
Not to mention clemency he granted to various child molesters and cop-killers on his way out the door.
So Trump had cover for his J6 mass pardon.?
“They’ve been treated very unfairly,” he said as he signed the executive orders. “The judges have been absolutely brutal. The prosecutors have been brutal. [The J6ers] have been in jail for a long time already.”
He’s right.
The “raindrop theory” of collective guilt was used by overzealous prosecutors and judges to impose extreme sentences on defendants charged with nonviolent crimes and hold them in detention without trial for two years or more, as independent reporter Julie Kelly so meticulously reported.
Most of the charges were for misdemeanors like trespassing or disorderly conduct. Yet anyone who so much as wandered into the Capitol through an open door or trespassed on the lawn was subjected to a full-scale federal investigation.?
Some, like New Yorker Joseph Bolanos, 69, had just attended the Trump rally and was back at his hotel when the riot broke out, yet he was subjected to an FBI dawn raid and arrested in front of his neighbors.
Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader, was sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy but was not even in DC that day.
He spent almost three years in jail before being pardoned.
Jacob Chansley, the QAnon shaman, spent 27 months in jail for walking into the Senate chamber.
Yes, some thugs committed violence against police, and that is reprehensible, but they have already spent three or four years in jail, much of it in pre-trial detention.
Among the worst was Ryan Samsel, who assaulted police with a bike rack and threw a pole and a 2-by-4 at police lines. Prosecutors recommended a 20-year prison term. He served three years and 11 months before being pardoned.?
Only one person, Guy Reffitt, was caught with a gun, which remained in its holster.
He was sentenced to seven years and had served four when he was pardoned.
Uneven justice
Even if you think they got off lightly, there has to be equal justice, and the lenient treatment of the Antifa-BLM rioters of 2020 suggests J6ers were unfairly treated.
Among the few convictions, the longest prison sentence was 10 years for Montez Terriel Lee Jr., who set fire to a Minneapolis pawn shop and caused the death of a man trapped inside.?
John Earle Sullivan was sentenced to six months in jail for assaulting police during a different riot in Washington, DC.
The riot at Lafayette Park in front of the White House in June 2020 was as much an assault on democracy as the J6 riot since it was so violent that Trump had to be moved to an underground bunker.?
The White House is as much a symbol of American democracy as the Capitol.
About 150 law enforcement officers were injured, and the historic St. John’s Church was set alight.?
But only a few Lafayette Park rioters wound up in federal court and their sentences were nothing compared to J6. Taylor Taranto got 60 days in prison for assault on a federal officer. Ruben Camacho got 364 days.
The conclusion is that the system is rigged against Trump supporters.
For Trump, it’s personal because he suffered from the same lawfare by the same people, with the same lies.
But in the end, the election turned the injustice on its head.