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Hiding Something Is Showing Something
So January 6 was a riot. An insurrection, even. Maybe treason? Perhaps even a coup attempt? Right. Definitely. But, the fools who attempted to replace the USA government with, um, a guy in a moose hat and no gun or something – anyway – those fools had no idea that there were surveillance cameras in the Capitol building. I mean, how could they possibly have suspected such a thing? Ha! We’ve got’em now! Ha ha!
“The Justice Department” has over 14,000 hours of video camera footage from countless cameras all over the Capitol Building on Jan 6. But believe it or not, there are some who still doubt that this was a coup, or an insurrection, or anything other than a protest of people wandering around taking selfies. But “The Justice Department” can disprove that! In only 14,o00 hours! Even less, if they put a sort of “greatest hits” videos on their website, accompanied by the full 14,000 hours for those who want to go through the whole sordid affair on their own. But regardless, that way, there would be no arguing. Nothing to argue about.
But you know what’s weird? “The Justice Department” itself has filed one injunction after another to prevent these videos from being released. Even though these very videos would prove their point, beyond the shadow of a doubt! Why is “The Justice Department” withholding the release of evidence that would support their case? Because they’re so confident! Or something! I think. Right? Um – right – um – ok, this is terrifying. Why on earth would “The Justice Department” withhold these videos? It’s been a year now. Why can’t the American people see what happened? Let’s stop arguing – just let us see what happened. You have the video. Let us see it, too. Then, no more arguing. Simple.
Until “The Justice Department” releases these videos, then I think that I know all that I need to know about January 6. If my government doesn’t want me to see these videos, then I don’t need to actually see these videos to understand what’s going on. Their efforts to hide them from me show me everything that I need to see.
Simple.
Prove me wrong, “Justice Department”.
Please.
Really – please. Please prove me wrong. I want to be wrong. I really do. This is the stuff of totalitarian regimes, right? This is not how the American government does things, right? Right? Prove me wrong. Please. Please prove me wrong.
Please…
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is grimly nodding his head right now. He tried to warn us. He really did. We didn’t listen.
What’s about to happen is not his fault.
For anyone who’s interested, you might take note that the pictures in this post up to this point are in chronological order. Backward. Because we’re going backward. Just in case anyone missed it. I’m trying to be obvious, here. It’s too late to be subtle, right?
Alexander tried, too. Perhaps his message was too subtle.
Perhaps my message is too subtle as well.
The message of “The Justice Department” is not subtle. There is no way that anyone could miss what they’re telling us, here. They’re being very open about their intentions. Who could possibly mistake that for anything other than an open threat? It’s not even a threat at this point. They’re just being honest. We should be appreciative, I suppose. They’re finally being honest about their intentions.
Most of us won’t listen to them, for various reasons. But at least they’re being honest now. We should be appreciative, I suppose.
You know things are bad when the simple act of acknowledging the obvious is an act of moral courage. At that point, you’re way down the rabbit hole.
But perhaps the lies of our government would have less impact if we declined to participate in them. Perhaps. Could be, I guess. I don’t know the answer to that question. And I suspect that I’d be happier if I never discovered the true answer to that question. Maybe I should give this some more thought. Or, maybe not.
I wonder who will win the Alabama – Georgia game?
America is a great country. I’m sure we’ll be fine.
Golly, Woodford Reserve is really good bourbon. One more glass won’t hurt anything…
“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.”
―
Ok. I generally keep myself under control, my hair pinned as tightly as my emotions.
here is my answer, unhinged,
BECAUSE
THE FBI
AND
THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
AND
THE MIS-LEDIA
ARE ALL F-ING LIARS.
There is no font large enough to convey my rage on this topic.
I came across this information in Slate, and I filed the following comment in a different post. Since it is directly on point I will reproduce it here:
I hesitate to comment because I am weary of fighting and arguing. However, the issue was raised of what has happened in with the people who have been arrested, and I just came upon a in-depth article about that from Slate. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/01/jan-6-capitol-riot-criminal-prosecutions-status.html. While it is frequently snarky, it has the best summary so far about the defendants. There were 733 defendants; 702 have been charged in the D.C. Federal District Court, and 32 in the D.C. Superior Court, mostly for lesser offenses such as curfew violations and unlawful entry on Capitol grounds.
Of the 702 defendants in Federal District Court, 99 have pled guilty and are awaiting sentencing. 72 have pled guilty and have been sentenced. Two died, two are fugitives and one pled “no contest.” The remaining 526 have pled not guilty.
At this point, about 85% have won some type of pretrial release. Only 15% have had to await trial while in jail. By contrast, in 2019, only 42% of defendants had pretrial release, while 58% were made to await trial in jail. Slate blames “systemic racism,” as you can well imagine. Among the people released are the following:
“Gregory Nix, allegedly attacked one officer with a flagpole seven times. Paul Rae, a Proud Boy charged with assaulting a police officer, was warned at one point by the judge that he had violated the conditions of his pretrial release, only to be given yet another chance. He then allegedly crashed his speedboat into an island while drunk. Bryan Betancur is an avowed white supremacist who declared he wanted to be a ‘lone wolf killer’ and was already on a GPS ankle monitor when he was arrested on Jan. 6. Luke Coffee, the Friday Night Lights actor, is accused of attacking a police officer with a crutch. Robert Sanford is a retired firefighter alleged to have thrown a fire extinguisher at police during the mob assault. Michael Joseph Foy allegedly attacked police with a hockey stick wrapped in a Trump 2020 flag and then complained that his jail conditions presented a ‘grave human rights abuse’ because there was ‘no time in front of the television.’ All of these men were eventually granted some form of pretrial release.”
If memory serves, last month or so there was a post about a Timothy Desjardins and allegations of his mistreatment. The Slate article states the following about him:
“Timothy Desjardins allegedly attacked officers with a broken wooden table leg and carried multiple axes to the riot. After the insurrection but prior to his arrest in November on Capitol riot charges, Desjardins was arrested in an armed standoff with police after violating the terms of bail from a prior incident in which he allegedly shot a man in the head.”
The article notes which defendants violated the conditions of their release, (Pauline Bauer, Brandon Fellows, and Thomas Robertson) and who got into trouble while out on bond (Mark Sahady, Elias Costianes, Patrick Montgomery, Jeremy Vorous, Matthew Eugene Loganbill, Patrick Stedman, and Kene Brian Lazo). It also talks about some of the more notorious individuals such as Robert Keith Packer, Kevin Seefried, James Rahm, Jr., Karol Chwiesiuk, Riley June Williams, Couy Griffin, Samuel Fisher, Stephanie Baez, Eric Munchel and Lisa Marie Eisenhart.
Don’t they have to give a reason for the injunction? What’s their official reasoning?
Probably something along the lines of “will damage national security if this is made public.” At least until we want to feed it to CNN or the NY Times. What a gang running the show.
Thanks for the link to that article. It is too snarky, which is a problem because that tone will turn off the people who most need to hear this information. This information is what many on the right need to hear. This false political prisoner narrative has been one of the most frustrating ones to come along, in my opinion. Partly because it’s so easy to fact check and dispel it, and partly because it nevertheless persists and is very corrosive. Some influential right leaning media personality should be putting out this same information. But in this era – where it’s all Jacobin witch hunts for traitors to the cause on both the right and the left (Ted Cruz is now a candidate for the metaphorical guillotine, apparently), none of those people seem willing to do that.
Comparison to federal prisoners as a whole is apples to oranges. About half of those are serious drug offenses, organized crime or involve violence. The applicable DC statutes about denying pre trial release are almost entirely about crimes involving use of weapons or a history of violent crimes. That does not apply to the vast majority of Jan 6 arrestees. With very few exceptions in that mob, I do not understand why all but a few were not arraigned and released much, much sooner. Claiming that this was business as usual strikes me as a stretch.
I think we’ve already seen the worst of the film footage of the January 6th rioters. It was displayed in a 13-minute video by the democrat house managers in Trump’s impeachment trial. They certainly would have chosen the worst 13 minutes out of those 14,000 hours of video from which to portray Trump in the worst possible light. We can assume that the rest of the 13,999.21 hours of video is less incriminating, and the vast majority is probably downright boring.
The vast majority were released on personal recognizance.
I understand that concern, given the coverage of this in some of the more extreme circles, but there is no reason to wonder about it. You can look at the dockets and, except where things occurred orally at hearings, in which case it’s recorded but not necessarily set out in writing other than a notation, see all the whens and why’s. No one has time to look at all of them, of course, but the few I’ve checked out, just looking into this issue because it interests me, it’s pretty clear things are going more or less as usual for our legal system. In any sample of 700+ cases, in any court system, you’re going to find things that seem odd at first glance. Cases are like snowflakes. Once you did into the details, you can see why things were done the way they were.
I think the fact that there were 700+ cases, after a year of tolerated autonomous zones and semi-sanctioned rioting, is what suggests to many of us that there is a political component to the response to the January 6th riot.
I think we’re witnessing the legal process leveraged to produce political theater. Whether or not that makes those caught up in it political prisoners is probably a matter of opinion. (I think it does.)
Which “details” specifically cover the rather straightforward questions about the timing of required processes that appear to have taken an unusually long time? You can’t be held in DC for more than 100 days without trial unless the defense has done something to cause or agree to delay. Some very bad people get bail or even personal recognizance as a result.
There was an increase in pretrial release rates in DC because of COVID and expected calendar delays.
Unrepresented people can and do get lost in the shuffle. But these were high profile defendants.
Again, I do not get why there was not a determination of eligibility for release at the outset for almost all of them.
DC has extensive historical experience with processing mass arrests so it is not as if this is such a novelty or a shock to the system justifying extensive delay.
I have dealt with incarcerated clients on civil matters in DC and know that conditions are rather variable across the facility, to put it mildly. I strongly suspect the timing and treatment of the Jan 6 people was designed to increase pressure to reveal any information leading to discovery of a great conspiracy and as a beatdown for perceived political enemies. There is a point at which the appearance of inefficiency becomes cover for bad intentions.
The attack on the Capitol was an idiotic sacrilege was angered us all. But back when the real ACLU still existed and law professors loved the law more than ideology, such people would be stepping up to tell us that this is precisely the kind of case with deeply (deservedly) unpopular defendants that tests the fundamental fairness of the system such that vindictive “inefficiency” should be barred.
I understand this concern as well, but I strongly disagree with the political theater part of it. That’s not to say some politicians arent’ making hay out of it, but that’s not the purpose of most of the people involved in the actual cases.
I think even this issue of disparate treatment of 1/6 rioters vs BLM rioters has been exaggerated and misunderstood.
First, there are different jurisdictions, different and completely unrelated prosecuting agencies involved. The vast vast majority of the BLM rioters violated state and local laws and prosecution of them belongs to those governments. The Feds have no role in that. No federal prosecutor involved in the 1/6 cases has anything to do with those state prosecutions.
Secondly, for those that did commit federal crimes (I think at least one Federal building was attacked) there were significant prosecutions in Federal Court. Regarding the BLM protestors, the AP reported that “more than 120 defendants across the United States have pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial of federal crimes including rioting, arson and conspiracy. More than 70 defendants who’ve been sentenced so far have gotten an average of about 27 months behind bars. At least 10 received prison terms of five years or more.” Keep in mind, again, the vast majority of the BLM rioters should be prosecuted in state courts. I don’t know exactly how aggressive they were prosecuted in those states – obviously there were some local prosecutors who announced they were going to go easy on them – but again, the 1/6 prosecutors had nothing to do with those decisions.
It’s also worth pointing out that it would be somewhat more difficult to prosecute the individuals involved in the BLM riots. The evidence would be harder to get. The 1/6 rioters were all over the live news – close up and in broad daylight. Many told everyone they knew and put out on social media that they were going to the capitol to stop the steal, they posted videos of themselves all over social media, they bragged loudly about their participation, it was a demonstration that they wanted people to see. The blm riots and looting, by contrast, happened mostly in the dark, with fewer people in identifiable videos, among populations far less likely to cooperate with authorities. So, there will naturally be relatively fewer who will be prosecuted – state or federal.
But that 100 day mark is not a hard and fast rule. Again, you really have to get into the specific cases to see what’s going on. You can’t just go declaring things politically rigged and unfair without doing that. We have a 90 day trial window in Ohio for incarcerated defendants. Most of the time it takes longer than that. Many of those guys are locked up for the duration for a number of reasons. I don’t do a lot in Fed. courts and I’ve actually been impressed with how closely the courts keep track of, and report on the docket, the speedy trial time calculations. These guys are getting their days in court. They are presenting their requests for relief and judges are ruling on those requests pursuant to the statute and relevant case law. In at least one case, a guy took his pre-trial detention order up to the Court of Appeals and lost. If you think they’re not following the statute – look at the court’s ruling and see what’s going on before you declare it a politicized scam.
They’re all represented. They all get appointed counsel if they can’t afford one.
Look at their cases, look at the rulings, and you will see why. Not that you’ll agree with it. I might not even in some cases, but the point is that’s how it always is, in completely non-political cases.
Suspect all you want, but that’s not proof of anything.
There was a Ricochet post about a month and a half ago about one of the incarcerated January 6th prisoners who had been held for about six months up to that time. He wrote a public letter outlining that he had been tortured and that other prisoners had broken arms that were not treated, and abuse by guards etc…. It sounded suspiciously over-the-top in its rhetoric. The question of his long (illegal?) incarceration before trial came up and D. A. Venters did some digging and discovered that the guy had filed all sorts of motions in court that delayed his trial, some probably for the purpose of delaying. I did a little digging too and found that the same guy had fired his original lawyer for not showing-up for one of the motion hearings. This caused yet another delay granted by the court for the benefit of the defendant. That lawyer was representing a number of January 6th defendants, and mysteriously disappeared in August, leaving his clients in the lurch. His irresponsibility caused extra delays for the January 6th prisoners he was defending.
I hope the full story of this incident “emerges” some time.
Yeah, I know. If you used that term I would point out that things don’t just emerge. You have to use emerge as a transitive verb. As in, “He emerged the truth out of the government bureaucrat with the help of a rubber hose.” Or, “He emerged the truth of the matter with the help of FOIA requests.”
You’re starting to sound like my wife!
It’s not like our legal system is fair, or fast, which is by design. The prosecution and the judges have a lot of leeway on who to persecute and how quickly to go to trial or even have hearings. This discretion is used to “encourage” pleas to lesser charges and drive up conviction rates. If everyone was willing to go to trial the system would collapse entirely. Perhaps it should because it certainly isn’t working very well, just better than the alternatives I suppose.
I’d buy that argument, but the Portland riots directly attacked the Federal Courthouse and the charges were Federal in nature. The number of people involved in active assaults on Federal property and officers was similar if not larger than 1/6 and there were 96 individuals charged with (as of mid 2021) over half having all charges dismissed and none having gone to trial. Few even saw the inside of a jail cell.
https://www.msn.com/en-US/news/us/almost-half-of-federal-cases-against-portland-rioters-have-been-dismissed/ar-BB1fGKGS?ocid=sapphireappshare
Either political violence is wrong and should be punished, or it’s an acceptable tool to enact political change. I prefer that we don’t allow it, but if only one side gets punished for political violence the result is going to be…