As everyone knows, the whitewash of January 6th began long ago, probably moments after Mitch McConnell was finished speaking about the criminal justice system dealing with Donald Trump. Admittedly, during that period, there was some agreement that Trump and his MAGAs had gone way too far.
That was then. But over the last few months, we began to hear the pushback, the comments from the most insane on the MAGA right saying it was mostly just a peaceful protest and that there were “leftist” agitators among the crowd, too. But the FBI has not arrested a single person from the attempted coup who didn’t have a long history with a Trump-MAGA obsession.
Now MSNBC is out with a new jaw-dropping report [1] that some of the most conservative (closest to Trump) senators have taken their whitewash to a new level. They want to make some of the rioters the victims of an overzealous government, the same government they tried to stop.
Last month, multiple Republican House members tried to manufacture an entirely new reality [2] in which the riot’s perpetrators were actually the victims. One GOP lawmaker described the rioters as “peaceful patriots,” and blasted law enforcement for “harassing” them. Another said the Jan. 6 violence more closely resembled a “normal tourist visit” than a deadly attack.
But yesterday, Republican Senators got involved with the “both sides” argument at an entirely new level. The people who attempted a coup at the Capitol and put the Vice President and Mike McCarthy in fear for their lives are now attempting to help those same coup plotters by sending Attorney General Merrick Garland a letter, asking Garland why he was being so hard on the MAGAs: As the Washington Post Explains:
The letter, signed by Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Ted Cruz of Texas, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Mike Lee of Utah and Rick Scott of Florida, asks Garland to provide information related to what they assert is “unequal justice” being meted out to those involved in the Capitol attack compared with other “mass unrest, destruction and loss of life.”
“DOJ’s apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals who allegedly committed crimes during the spring and summer 2020 protests stands in stark contrast to the harsher treatment of the individuals charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 breach of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.”
Notice that these Senators do not bring up any specific examples of near-identical behavior and a disparity in the results. Meanwhile, we seem to remember a president promising an “automatic ten years in prison” for anyone who damages a federal building. These Senators did not complain that summer.
As put by MSNBC:
“In other words, the GOP senators are deeply concerned about whether federal law enforcement treated racial-justice protesters better than members of the pro-Trump mob that attacked the seat of our democracy in order to hunt American elected officials and derail our system of elections.”
Given that DOJ and the FBI have not completed their investigations, and given that this plan might have originated at some of the highest levels of government, to the point that it could be called “treason,” we wonder if the letter might even hurt the GOP’s cause.
No, we don’t wonder. These senators could likely care less about the actual prosecution of actual MAGAs. Their task is to shift the attempted coup into nothing more than a protest in which the protesters went just a bit too far because that’s what people do when an election is stolen.
It is a whitewash of the most serious attack on American democracy done by the party that is not afraid to do away with democracy altogether.
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Peace, y’all
Jason
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