Our reasons for saying this are simple: Firstly, the events of January 6 have been so politicized that evidence has become utterly irrelevant in the eyes of the public. Secondly, that because every J6 trial must necessarily take place in Washington, DC, where a J6 defendant is more likely to find a pink elephant than an unbiased jury, no finding of guilt in those courts can be considered determinative. Thirdly, that the defendants have either done their time, or have (at least) been punished by the legal process more than sufficiently for a few hours of rioting. And fourthly, that given the Biden administration’s lenient-to-the-point-of-ridicule approach to much more dangerous rioting undertaken that same year, and given the tenuous accusations against even the armed J6ers, it’s clear that these trials were not an earnest effort to restore public order, but rather to persecute political opponents.
Ironically, to prove that January 6 is not merely politicized beyond all reason, but especially so in Washington, DC, we need only point to the words of its most zealous prosecutor, our somehow-still-president Joe Biden. This week, Biden took to the pages of the Washington Post to commemorate the event in a portentous smelling fart of an article with the subtitle “Four years ago, our democracy was put to the test – and prevailed.”
Technically, this is correct: our democracy was put to the test by the unprecedented scale to which America’s established institutions put their thumb on the scale for Joe Biden, and it did prevail, though not until this year. But let that pass. As but a sample of what Biden believes actually happened on January 6, here he is in his own words: “Violent insurrectionists attacked the Capitol, threatened the lives of elected officials and (sic) assaulted brave law enforcement officers.”
Now, let’s take this piece by piece. Firstly, Biden calls the J6ers “violent insurrectionists.” The only person who died as a direct result of January 6, 2021 was Ashli Babbitt, who was a J6er herself. No firearms were brought into the Capitol on January 6, 2021; no deadly weapons at all, unless you count a fire extinguisher and a can of bear spray, not exactly the stuff of modern warfare. Moreover, calling them “insurrectionists” is a claim not supported by Biden’s own Department of Justice (DOJ), which has yet to charge a single person from the January 6 riot as an insurrectionist, a traitor, or a rebel.
Secondly, Biden claims they attacked the Capitol. Actually, they calmly walked inside. Thirdly, he claims they threatened the lives of elected officials, and this is the closest to being true, seeing as the crowd did chant “hang Mike Pence.” But given they had no firearms, the “threat” in question was clearly idle. Fourthly, he claims they assaulted law enforcement officers; this is true in the same sense that the Boston Massacre was technically provoked. Again, those law enforcement officers killed one of the protesters and, while the Left has done its best to tie the death of various Capitol Police officers with unrelated conditions to January 6, these efforts have fallen flat. In other words, every part of Biden’s sentence is either fictitious or slanted to the point of being misleading. Yet he has the gall to claim, at the same time he repeats these whoppers, that “an unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand."
We have no intention of rewriting anything, Joe. Rewriting – or rather, recoloring — history is your party’s game. But you have made a very sensible point without realizing it: the two parties can agree on what actually happened on January 6. So how are we supposed to try those responsible fairly, let alone in the very city in whose hometown paper you published this sanctimonious gob of spit?
Answer: we can’t. To see that, you need only look at the actual record of the J6 trials, where people have been found guilty and sentenced to comically long prison sentences over dubious wrongdoing, and contrast them with the trials undertaken by former Special Counsel John Durham, in which even cast-iron evidence of wrongdoing was dismissed by DC juries. DC juries apply the same rules to trials as the Peruvian dictator Oscar Benavides: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” To permit their verdicts to stand would, therefore, necessarily be to permit miscarriages of justice, especially in a nation that has historically always believed that it is better to let ten guilty men go free than let one innocent man hang.
And make no mistake, guilty or not, many J6 defendants have been proverbially hanging for quite some time. Indeed, we would argue that even if you are not inclined to sympathy with the J6ers, you must acknowledge that their sins against democracy pale in comparison to those committed by the vengeful Left in order to punish them. There is no good argument why, for example, Enrique Tarrio deserves 22 years in prison, nor for why other members of the Proud Boys deserve comparable sentences. Nor is there any justification in the fact that Biden’s prosecutors have been sending 71 year old grandmothers to prison even as their senile leader commutes the sentences of child-killers and rapists. For heaven’s sake, even now, the Left is trying to jail people, despite the fact that they will likely be let out when Trump takes office. The Captain Ahabesque zeal with which Biden’s prosecutors have hounded and persecuted even harmless J6ers has rendered the whole thing not just impossible to take seriously, but a stain on the American justice system. It’s time to put an end to it altogether, and President-elect Trump can only do that by pardoning everyone involved.
Which brings us to the final point: the fact that, even as it tries to seal J6ers in prison for life on specious grounds, the Biden administration has treated its political allies quite differently when they riot. Numbers alone tell the story here. Biden’s DOJ has, according to their own figures, charged more than 1500 individuals over January 6, 2021. That’s for one day of rioting. You want to know how many people they’ve charged over offenses related to “summer of love” riots, which lasted 100 days, didn’t involve just occupying a government building but rather trying to burn it down, and resulted in the rioters even setting up their own ersatz government in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (which seems far closer to insurrection to us)? 300 people. Yes, only 300 charges for something that happened across 29 states and the District of Columbia for months versus 1500 for something that happened in DC over the course of a single day.
And that’s not even getting into the quality of the charges. If one looks more closely at the DOJ’s own database of Capitol Breach cases (their term for January 6 offenses), one finds absurdities like people being charged for possessing firearms…that they didn’t even have on them at the Capitol. Yes, they really got that petty. But you know the one thing they haven’t been petty about? Establishing just who planted pipe bombs on January 6 – pipe bombs which, thank God, never went off. Let’s be clear: if Biden’s DOJ was really concerned about preventing seditious acts of terror, finding that person would be their first, second, and third priority. The Biden administration knows as well as we do that if those bombs had detonated, J6 would deservedly live in infamy with every American. They also know that if the culprit were found to be a supporter of President-elect Trump, then Trump’s political career would’ve been far more difficult to resuscitate. Yet, the person responsible remains at large. We won’t get into irresponsible speculation, but at best, this shows that the Left is only competent at persecuting people who can’t fight back. In short, that they’re bullies who are incapable of actually protecting anyone.
In other words, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see January 6, 2021 for what it was: at worst, a misguided and civically damaging riot, which so triggered the Left that they transformed America’s justice system into an instrument of naked political vengeance, and in so doing, endangered democracy far more successfully than anything that happened on J6 itself. It is time for the specter of that day to be laid to rest. It is time for this vengeful obsession of the establishment and the Left (but repeat ourselves) to be ended. It is time for America to move on. Therefore, when he takes the oath of office on January 20, 2025, President-elect Trump should pardon all those involved.
