Sure enough, his guest Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, let out a big one on the same show. Raskin is the worst sort of leftwing apparatchik who will say just about anything to move the cause of the Revolution forward. Video is cued up to the pertinent portion.
I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to this speaker today about this.
And, look, I know that everybody wants to focus on trial tactics and strategy and so on. I want people to focus on the solemnity and the gravity of these events. Five Americans are dead because a violent mob was encouraged, exhorted and incited by the president of the United States of America, which broke into the Congress of the United States, into the Capitol, and came within a hair’s breadth of hanging Vice President Pence.
I mean, the ears — the words are still ringing in the ears of the members: “Hang Mike Pence. Hang Mike Pence.” They — they built a gallows outside the Capitol of the United States. There was an assassination party hunting for Nancy Pelosi. So, this cannot be at the level of normal partisan push and pull and just kind of throwing rhetorical brickbats back and forth. This was an attack on our country.
The issue of the President’s role in the Capitol Riot is not settled and will be decided in a Senate trial. That a mob rioted in the Capitol is not disputed. But beyond that point, Raskin engages in sheer propaganda. Factually, there is no evidence of Vice President Mike Pence being in any danger at all. He was accompanied by his security detail and, according to the Washington Post, was in a secure area in the Capitol before the rioters ever made their way into the Senate chamber. The story spun by some federal prosecutors in Arizona at a preliminary hearing for a man arrested in conjunction with the Capitol riot that there was evidence that “supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States government,” has been walked back and denied by the Department of Justice (see OOPS: Justice Department Walks Back Assertion That Capitol Rioters Wanted to ‘Capture and Assassinate’ Pence, Pelosi, Others). The only evidence that an “assassination party” was hunting down Nancy Pelosi comes from this Newsweak, I mean Newsweek, story:
An FBI witness says that members of the far-right Proud Boys had hoped to assassinate Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi during last week’s violent storming of the U.S. Capitol.
An FBI special agent made the claim in an affidavit as part of a criminal complaint against 43-year-old Dominic Pezzola, who is accused of taking part in the riot in support of President Donald Trump’s false claims that the presidential election was “stolen.” Pezzola, who is also known as “Spaz,” allegedly used a shield taken from a Capitol Police officer to smash a Capitol window before entering the building. An FBI witness said that the group Pezzola was with had discussed committing violent acts that went far beyond property damage.
“[The witness] stated that other members of the group talked about things that they had done during the day, and they said that anyone they got their hands on they would have killed, including Nancy Pelosi,” the affidavit, which was filed Wednesday, reads. “[The witness] further stated that members of this group, which included ‘Spaz,’ said that they would have killed [Vice President] Mike Pence if given the chance.”
This is but an FBI agent’s recitation of claims he says were made. As we are all too aware from the Mike Flynn case, these claims by federal agents may be a lot less than a totally accurate representation of facts. We also know from the 2020 election dispute that affidavits are not evidence of anything.
According to the Daily Mail, the US Attorney for the District of Columbia has thrown cold water on this idea:
‘We don’t have any direct evidence of kill capture teams,’ Michael Sherwin, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said in a press conference with reporters on Friday.
So none of the personal recollections by Raskin appear to be true. Vice President Pence was never with a “hair’s breadth” of being hanged. Other than some people yelling stuff, we’ve yet to see any evidence presented that anyone planned to harm him. The story of an assassination team pursuing Pelosi, though it might make a good Lifetime movie, is likewise fictitious. Both of those claims were either known or should have been known by Tapper to be false. He sat there and let Raskin lie, and he did nothing. In fact, he egged it on.
The events of the day were traumatic enough in their own right. A demonstrator was shot dead. Three others suffered medical emergencies and died. A Capitol Police officer died in his office and the cause of his death is still under investigation. There is no need to spin falsehoods just to push the Democrat agenda of impeachment but that is exactly the kind of thing Raskin does.
We are about to enter an era of propagandizing and gaslighting the like of which we have never before seen. The media and Democrat politicians are friends, neighbors, and frequently they are intermarried. They have family and tribal loyalties that trump any sort of responsibility to the country or to the truth. They will lie and aid and abet lying to move the Democrat agenda forward without even a twinge of conscience. Keep that in mind at all times.