Jan. 6 committee has failed to show Trump responsible for security failure

 BECKER NEWS 

by Kyle Becker

July 22, 2022

The partisan January 6 committee has utterly failed to show that former President Donald Trump was in any responsible for the massive security failure that led to protesters overwhelming the Capitol building during the convening of the Electoral College.

In the Inspector General’s report on the Department of Defense’s response to the Capitol riots, there is a passage that fundamentally undercuts everything the partisan January 6 committee has been claiming about Donald Trump’s role in the purported ‘insurrection.’

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“Mr. Miller and GEN Milley met with the President at the White House at 5:30 p.m,” the IG report states. “The primary topic they discussed was unrelated to the scheduled rally. GEN Milley told us that at the end of the meeting, the President told Mr. Miller that there would be a large number of protestors on January 6, 2021, and Mr. Miller should ensure sufficient National Guard or Soldiers would be there to make sure it was a safe event. Gen Milley told us that Mr. Miller responded, ‘We’ve got a plan and we’ve got it covered’.”

They had a “plan,” but it apparently wasn’t securing the capitol against protesters and far-right extremists. The Capitol Police’s aiding-and-abetting of the protesters by opening doors and removing barricades, while merely observing the purported existential threat to the Congress, also appears to have been part of the “plan.” None of these Capitol Police officers have been held fully accountable.

The memo was brought back to light by John Solomon of Just the News on Friday, in light of the House Democrats ending their January 6 show trial on Thursday night.

Beyond the memo showing the president’s desire for a “safe event” was perfectly clear, even though the commander-in-chief was evidently ignored by the Pentagon brass, Trump himself had repeatedly stated his desire for “peace” on January 6.

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Major General William J. Walker, the commanding general of the D.C. National Guard, also confirmed that capitol security had been deliberately weakened due to a purported concern about “optics,” as he stated in Congressional testimony in March 2021.

Furthermore, the commanding general made it clear that such concerns were “unusual” and had not been raised during a similar civil disturbance in Washington D.C. the previous summer, which had threatened the Trump White House.

The Pentagon also placed limits on the National Guard’s ability to mobilize and prepare for the riots, the Washington Post reported.

President Trump had informally requested that 10,000 National Guard troops be at the capitol.

“Former President Trump told Fox News… that he expressed concern over the crowd size near the Capitol days before last month’s deadly riots and personally requested 10,000 National Guard troops be deployed in response,” Fox News reported.

The president’s expressed concern is confirmed by the Inspector General's verification of the Pentagon memo.

The Washington Post, while claiming to have debunked the president’s request for more National Guard troops, actually corroborates it. The Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler tucks the nugget within a story headlined “Trump falsely claims he ‘requested’ 10,000 troops rejected by Pelosi.”

“[Acting Defense Secretary Christopher] Miller and other senior Pentagon officials never relayed the 10,000 figure to anyone outside the Defense Department, according to a former U.S. official who was familiar with the matter,” the WaPo report admitted.

“They didn’t act on it because based on discussions with federal and local law enforcement leadership, they didn’t think a force of that size would be necessary,” the former official said.

Thus, it was the Pentagon’s fault that it did not act on former President Trump’s concern that the January 6 protesters might pose a security problem. It is quite the odd issue to raise for a president who was purportedly part of a plot against the United States.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s potential role in the delay over authorizing National Guard troops was raised by the conflicting testimony of former House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving. The January 6 committee has conveniently dodged any-and-all questions that may trace back to negligence or political scheming by the Democratic Party.

Thus, the January 6 committee is not leading an “investigation,” but a cover-up job. And the longer the anti-Trump partisans decry President Donald Trump and point the finger at him, the guiltier they all look.

Jan. 6 The Flaw in the Argument if Babbit was a legal shot?

 In April, the Biden Department of Justice announced they had closed the investigation into the fatal shooting and would not be pursuing criminal charges against Byrd, citing “insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.”

Just last week, the Capitol Police confirmed a report from NBC News that they had exonerated Byrd, a 28-year veteran of the force. They stated in a press release that Byrd – who they did not name – “will not be facing internal discipline” because in their view Byrd’s conduct “was lawful and within Department policy, which says an officer may use deadly force only when the officer reasonably believes that action is in the defense of human life, including the officer’s own life, or in the defense of any person in immediate danger of serious physical injury.”

On the heels of the USCP exonerating Byrd, he did an interview with NBC News anchor Lester Holt, identifying himself publicly for the first time.

Instead of clearing things up, the interview only intensified the debate over his actions and whether they were justified. Here’s a key moment from their back and forth:

Video shot by a person in the crowd showed two officers posted in front of the door.Heavily outnumbered, they eventually stepped aside. Byrd said he had no knowledge that any officers were there. Because of the furniture stacked on his side of the door, he also couldn’t make out how many people were on the other side or whether they were carrying weapons.

“It was impossible for me to see what was on the other side,” he said.

But he did see the person now known to be Babbitt start coming through the broken glass.

“I could not fully see her hands or what was in the backpack or what the intentions are,” Byrd said. “But they had shown violence leading up to that point.”

Byrd, who says he has been in hiding since that day and has faced death threats, told Holt it was the first time he’d ever fired his weapon.

Watch an edited version of the interview below:

The extended interview can be viewed here.

Georgetown University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley, who has long been a critic of official media narratives surrounding the shooting, said that instead of confirming that the respective decisions by the DOJ and the Capitol Police not to pursue action against Byrd were the right ones to make that Byrd “proceeded to demolish the two official reviews that cleared him” after he admitted he could not determine whether Babbitt was armed:

He expanded on his opinion in a piece published at The Hill:

Under these standards, police officers should not shoot unarmed suspects or rioters without a clear threat to themselves or fellow officers.

[…]

Legal experts and the media have avoided the obvious implications of the two reviews in the Babbitt shooting. Under this standard, hundreds of rioters could have been gunned down on Jan. 6 — and officers in cities such as Seattle or Portland, Ore., could have killed hundreds of violent protesters who tried to burn courthouses, took over city halls or occupied police stations during last summer’s widespread rioting. In all of those protests, a small number of activists from both political extremes showed up prepared for violence and pushed others to riot. According to the DOJ’s Byrd review, officers in those cities would not have been required to see a weapon in order to use lethal force in defending buildings.

I’m not a legal analyst, but I think Turley makes some good points here.

— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —

A Study Shows VERY FEW Capitol Hill Rioters ...With Ties to 'Right Wing' Groups

 A survey by the University of Chicago finds that most Capitol Hill rioters had no ties to any fringe right-wing groups and were engaged people outraged by what they believed was a rigged elect

While colorful weirdos with names such as QAnon Shaman and Baked Alaska stole the headlines, people who were arrested by federal officials during and after the riot were a “broader core of people” with a healthy skepticism about the veracity of the November 2020 election, according to the study.

There was plenty of reason for the skepticism, considering the collusion between Big Tech, unions, law fare, and Democrats’ combined efforts to sway the election. Those efforts were at the very least unethical.

As Time Magazine enthused in an article entitled, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” “there was a conspiracy unfolding behind the [election] scenes” of an “informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans” to “save” the election from Donald Trump.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President.

[…]Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smearsRather than being ill-informed, it appears that the Capitol Building rioters may have been better informed than most on these moves to sway the election.

In a “working paper” that is considered to be a “novel approach” to “estimating community-level participation in mass protest events,” Asst. Prof. Austin Wright of the Harris School of Public Policy and David Van Dijcke of the University of Michigan found a surprising number of the people arrested at the Capitol Hill riot who were business owners and other professionals obviously upset over election fraud.

The paper found that those arrested were “more likely to have traveled to the Capitol from Trump-voting “islands,” where residents are surrounded by neighborhoods with higher numbers of Biden supporters.” More than half came from counties that Joe Biden carried.

Though the researchers include the fact that the overwhelming number of people live in Democrat areas, they also highlighted the fact “that proximity to Proud Boy chapters and local levels of engagement with misinformation posted on Parler, the exiled social media platform popular with the far right, are robustly linked to participation in the Capitol rally.”

However, researcher Austin Wright said living in those leftist areas “played a significant role.”

Social isolation and the perception of being threatened by neighboring areas that largely hold opposing political views also played a significant role in who was there. The researchers also looked at cell phone data such as where in the country Capitol rioters called. Most were in the eastern, central, and southern parts of the country. Could the canceled culture and being surrounded by people with Trump Derangement Syndrome, and other anti-conservative have helped trigger the attack?

They claimed some of the rioters were on the social media app Parler, though efforts to discover other social media apps used by the people arrested were not noted. 

The survey found that approximately 10% percent of the Capitol rioters had a connection with Proud Boys, which they describe as a “hate group,” and Oath Keepers.

Nearly 90% had no ties or right-wing affiliations whatsoever.

And they found out that 85% of the people arrested were business owners or held down white collar jobs.

WTTW TV reported that researchers hadn’t even needed a “business owner” category before when looking into protest groups. Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago oversaw the study and said the caliber of people at the riot was surprising.

“Normally, we don’t even have a category for ‘business owner’ when we study political violence, so this is a very big sign that we’re dealing with a new political movement with violence at its core that can’t be reduced to the usual suspects.”

Jobs held by Capitol rioters.

President Trump also appealed to a wide variety of Americans from all socio-economic backgrounds. The fact that the rioters were not red meat, right-wing fanatics threw researchers for a loop. It also forced some reflection by researchers about the people who believe there was election fraud, according to the study.

What we are dealing with here is not merely a mix of right-wing organizations, but a broader mass movement with violence at its core. We need to do more to understand who we are dealing with in the new movement. Targeting pre-2021 far right organizations alone will not solve the problem.

Perhaps they should consider that the 2020 election was seen by half the country as rigged. Election integrity efforts, not name-calling, lawfare, and canceling others who hold politically opposing views, will be key in winning back confidence in the elections process. If Democrats pass HR 1, all bets will be off.

 

Victoria Taft is the host of “The Adult in the Room Podcast With Victoria Taft” where you can hear her series on “Antifa Versus Mike Strickland.” Find it  here.Follow her on Facebook,  Twitter, Parler, MeWe, Minds @VictoriaTaft 

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