“I fear that you will get more violence,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham on “Meet the Press” this Sunday. “Pardoning the people who went into the Capitol and beat up a police officer violently I think it was a mistake.”
In so saying, Graham, like so many pundits on the Right, showed how little he knows about what transpired on January 6, 2021, and during the four years afterward. In truth, the one thing all J6ers have in common, including the allegedly violent ones, is that they had no more chance at securing justice in Joe Biden’s D.C. than the Scottsboro Boys had in Jim Crow Alabama.
In 2020, 95 percent of the D.C. citizens voted against Donald Trump. If this jury pool were not poisoned enough, the media lied relentlessly to potential jurors about the “insurrection,” about “white supremacist” mobs, about cops being “murdered” -- pick a number of dead cops, 1 to 5.
A change of venue would seem to have been in order, but none was allowed, and the juries lived down to expectations. They acquitted not a single J6er. Knowing the odds against them, hundreds of defendants pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit -- including felony assault.
The Scottsboro Boys at least had the major media and the ACLU on their side, The J6ers had neither. On the first anniversary of January 6, for instance, all 51 ACLU chapters signed on to a letter drafted by the D.C. ACLU about “the white supremacists” that invaded the U.S. Capitol. The date was the only thing the ACLU got right:
“On January 6 of last year, the residents of D.C. were traumatized as an insurrectionist mob roamed our streets, harassed our neighbors, and violently broke into the Capitol Building, killing at least five people -- all in an attempt to overthrow the counting of American citizens’ votes.”
What makes this letter doubly perverse is that the ACLU signees had a fresh memory of what an insurrectionist mob actually looked like. They saw elements of this mob in action over a three-week period that began on May 29, 2020.
On the night of May 29, rioters threw rocks, alcohol, and urine at the Secret Service agents guarding the White House, injuring more than 60 of them. On May 30, rioters defaced the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial. The next night they looted dozens of businesses and set St. John’s Episcopal Church on fire.
On June 6, insurrectionists painted “Defund the Police” on a city street. On June 19, they toppled the statue of Albert Pike and set it on fire. On June 23, they tried to do the same with the Andrew Jackson statue in front of the White House but settled on defacing it before being dispersed. Said the ACLU about these incidents. “We will fight government violence against protestors across the country.”
Among the most aggressive of those “protestors” was Antifa leader Jason Charter. His interaction with the law hews close to the norm for George Floyd rioters.In July 2020, the Feds arrested Charter for heading up a “very organized” effort to destroy the two statues. “Charter was on top of the [Jackson] statue and directing people,” a law enforcement officer told Fox News. “They had acid, chisels, straps and a human chain preventing police from getting to the statue.”
Before the arrest, on June 26, Charter assaulted One America News Network reporter Jack Posobiec and was subsequently arrested. Despite the seriousness of these multiple charges, Charter was roaming free on October 3, 2020, when he and his comrades disrupted a “Walk Away” rally at the Washington Monument. Brandon Straka, the leader of the movement, had a permit for the rally at which he and others shared stories about leaving the Democratic Party before the attack.
When police tried to remove the Charter crew from the Walk Away rally, they “became assaultive to U.S. Park Police officers.” Charter himself was “charged with Assault on a Police Officer and Possession of a Controlled Substance.”
Incredibly, despite his arrest for assaulting Posobiec, assaulting the police, and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage, prosecutors offered Charter a deal allowing him to plead guilty to the single misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct on restricted grounds.
In January 2022, Charter was sentenced to three years of probation, 60 days of home detention, and $2,600 fine. Knowing how George Floyd justice worked, Charter considered the sentence “appalling.” He told a Fox News2 reporter, “I expected to walk out of there with probation, which seemed consistent with other people who were charged in this case.” To clarify, he meant “other” of his people.
Charter remains unrepentant. On January 20 of this year, he posted on X a video titled “Black Bloc Smashes Inauguration.” The video shows his masked colleagues on January 20, 2017, defacing buildings, breaking windows, vandalizing police cars, and spraying gas from canisters. Says Charter, “One of my favorite day of action in my life. Made a lot of memories and friends during Disrupt J20.”
In November 2017, six of the Disrupt J20 people went on trial in D.C. Given the jury pool, all six were found not guilty on all counts. In January 2018, the DoJ dropped charges against 129 others. By July 2018, federal prosecutors had dropped all charges against all defendants, and this was before George Floyd mania seized the city.
For my book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, I profiled 10 women, eight of whom survived the day. The police officers responsible for the arguably criminal deaths of Ashli Babbitt and Rosanne Boyland were both rewarded, one with a trip to the Super Bowl, the other with a bonus and promotion. They faced no discipline at all.
The men who tried to protect the J6 women paid a high price. Luke Coffee, who stood over the dying Rosanne Boyland with a crutch to protect her from the blows of policewoman Lila Morris, was found guilty of “assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers using a dangerous weapon” among other charges.
Victoria White endured what was arguably the most severe police beating of a female ever captured on video. Kyle Fitzsimmons tried to protect her and was sentenced to 87 months in prison for his efforts.
Of the eight surviving women that I profiled, seven went to prison, and all were punished more severely than Jason Charter. Reviewing their cases closely, I could see that none of them had a chance. If the juries weren’t problem enough, prosecutors routinely hid exculpatory evidence and exaggerated their offenses with impunity.
Only one of the eight women committed what a dispassionate observer would recognize as a crime. Rachel Powell, “a very granola, very crunchy” mother of eight with no criminal record, helped break a window. Powell was sentenced to 57 months in prison followed by 36 months of supervised release.
"Trump keeps his promises," Powell said upon her release last week. "My family can start rebuilding our life again, and we can move forward from Jan. 6 into the future and make America great again."
Those who say Trump should have proceeded on a case-by-case fail to understand that nothing was what it appeared on January 6, that almost every case was corrupted, that some of our best citizens were deemed our worst. Until they get their facts straight, our friends in D.C. are better off saying nothing at all.
