It hardly needs to be said that the Democrats’ select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, on Capitol Hill appears to have had little to no interest in justice. Its purpose was not to uncover a nefarious plot to overthrow the US government but to build a case against former President Donald Trump. The goal? To prevent the 45th president from running again for the presidency or any other political office. Even without a criminal indictment, Democrats hoped to poison the American people against Trump by presenting a story of carnage and chaos visited upon the Capitol by his enraged supporters whipped into a frenzy, of course, by the man himself. After seeing what he had wrought, an appalled electorate would surely never dream of electing him again. But then came the release of the January 6 tapes.
The Democrats’ effort began to unravel with the continuing publication of hours of video captured in and around the Capitol building on that infamous day. Now that the narrative building has been disclosed to the voting public, Trump has a huge opportunity to capitalize on it during his White House campaign. By the same token, Joe Biden and congressional Democrats could well find themselves reeling from accusations of dishonesty and duplicity; they have attempted to deceive the public by concealing exculpatory evidence.
Why the January 6 Tapes Were Buried
There is a good reason why Trump’s political enemies did not want the people to see the January 6 tapes unedited. It’s the same reason why, now, left-wing talking heads and journalists are furious that Fox News’s Tucker Carlson obtained the videos and is airing them on his show. On the tapes, Trump supporters can be seen strolling through the seat of Congress, alongside police officers, acting more like sightseers than violent insurrectionists.
Kamala Harris told the nation that Jan 6 was comparable to the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center. “Certain dates echo throughout history,” she said during a speech on Jan. 7, 2021, “including dates that instantly remind all who have lived through them where they were and what they were doing, when our democracy came under assault: December 7, 1941, September 11, 2001, and January 6, 2021.”
For context, it is worth noting that the Pearl Harbor and Twin Towers attacks, combined, took the lives of 5,380 Americans. On Jan. 6, four people died – all of them Trump supporters – including Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed veteran who was shot at point-blank range by a Capitol Police officer.
That is not to say there wasn’t violence on Jan. 6. It is not to say that nobody really forced their way into the Capitol building or that there were no physical altercations with police officers. Those things all happened. A significant portion of the American conservative movement was disgusted by it. Even many of the Trump supporters at the protest that day were visibly upset that damage was done to the hallowed building. Nevertheless, the violence was minor, considering the tens of thousands of people present. If one assumes fifty thousand protesters – and there were at least that many – not even five percent were violent, since that would have been 2,500 people fighting the relatively few police officers deployed for security. The casualties would have been significant. In reality, less than one percent of the gathered crowd perpetrated vandalism and violence. The January 6 tapes show that the Capitol was not ransacked by a rampaging mob.
Jacob Chansley (photo by Brent Stirton/Getty Images)
Of particular interest, recently, is the case of Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, who is currently serving a 41-month prison sentence for “obstructing a federal proceeding,” namely, the certification of 2020 Electoral College votes. Chansley never got the opportunity to use the January 6 tapes in his defense, and neither did any of the other defendants detained after that day, it can now be assumed. Neither the public nor the jury got to see him walking peacefully around the Capitol building escorted by police officers. They didn’t see the video of him later urging the crowd to disperse because “We made our point and Donald Trump has asked for everybody to go home.” Dressed in horns and face paint and wielding a bullhorn, Chansley continued, “So, what are we going to do? We are going to obey our president; we’re going to do what he asked.”
This evidence, which may well have changed the outcome of Chansley’s trial and perhaps might also have exonerated many others, had been in the possession of the Department of Justice. Then, a good deal of it – or perhaps all of it – went to the Jan. 6 select committee. None of it was provided to lawyers representing the hundreds of individuals detained and charged with various offenses related to Jan. 6, it appears.
These tapes are a gift to Donald Trump. He can now claim that he was framed, that there was no attempted insurrection, and that his opponents concealed the full truth about what happened.
Donald Trump (Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
Meanwhile, the very people who have tried so hard to prevent Trump from running again may be forced to defend their selective editing of the facts. No doubt, the section of America that hates Trump will not care about what the January 6 tapes show. They may well claim the videos don’t tell the whole story. What of the all-important independents, though, and the moderate Democrats who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 but approved of the results he produced during his one term in the White House? What of those who knew nothing about the events of Jan. 6 save what they heard on CNN or read in The New York Times? What happens when they realize that the horror stories they were told about that day bear little relation to what really transpired? Will they trust Biden with another term? Will they give Democrats control of Congress even in the face of such mendacity? Will they reconsider whatever skepticism they harbored for Trump and decide that he has been set up and his supporters unfairly maligned?
These are the questions Trump’s detractors should now be asking themselves. Perhaps it would have been better for them if they had shunned the idea of a Jan. 6 investigation in the first place. It would have been smarter to argue their case to the people, present the evidence without bias and allowed the voters to decide for themselves whether Trump deserves to lead the country again. As Liberty Nation’s Editor-in-Chief, Leesa K. Donner, recently wrote, “[N]othing is more abhorrent to a red-blooded American than the miscarriage of justice.”
