Thom Hartmann: We Don't Need No Stinkin' Commission to Turn January 6 Into "Bipartisan" Mush. Prosecute the Insurrectionists, Including Trump.
April 15, 2021
Investigate and prosecute the January 6 insurrectionists, and the role of political officials in enabling it. Then prosecute them. (Mike Licht)
By Thom Hartmann
America needs and deserves to find out what happened on and in the time leading up to the January 6th attempt to overthrow our country.
Nancy Pelosi and some Democrats are pushing for a by bipartisan “9/11 style commission.” They want to investigate the murderous siege of the US Capitol by traitors following Donald Trump who wanted to replace democracy in America with fascist strong-man rule.
That would be a mistake.
With the majority of elected Republicans around the country and in DC continuing to promote Donald Trump‘s Big Lie that he won the election and using that Big Lie to push voter suppression and anti-democracy legislation, inviting Republicans to participate in an accountability process in any way would be worse than a waste of time.
Plus, “bipartisan” commissions tend to ignore unpleasant truths and go for easy, palatable answers. It’s why the Warren Commission and the 9/11 Commission are both widely seen as milquetoast compromises at best, and coverups at worst.
But there are huge questions that America deserves answers to.
A report just released by the Office of the Inspector General for the Capital Police shows that the senior leadership at the Capitol Police were informed well in advance that Trump’s white supremacist mob was coming for Members of Congress, that they were armed, and that they were prepared to spill blood.
The report is not yet public, but The New York Times read it and excerpted parts of it a few days ago.
“Be ready to fight,” the Times reports the killers coming to the Capitol were saying to each other. “Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa [sic] slave soldiers being spilled.”
That was one of the messages from the white supremacists planning the January 6 insurrection that the FBI’s Norfolk field office in Virginia forwarded to the Capitol Police on January 5.
The message continued, “Get violent… Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”
Three days before the riot, an internal assessment by the Capitol Police laid it out: “Supporters of the current president see January 6, 2021, as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election. This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent.”
The Capitol Police’s Intelligence Unit, on January 3, concluded:
“Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counterprotesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th. Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence may lead to a significantly dangerous situation for law-enforcement and the general public alike.”
Inexplicably, the Capitol Police response to all this intelligence was to do less than nothing. Leadership actively blocked the CP’s Civil Disturbance Unit from using “less lethal” weapons like stun grenades or rubber bullets. The rank-and-file wasn’t told about the intelligence, and neither was Congress alerted.
Even most of the shields the Capitol Police had carried during the BLM protests in June and would use in a riot situation were locked in a bus off-premises, and nobody that day had the keys to the bus when they tried to retrieve them during the attack.
Apparently nobody noticed that a gallows was being erected on the grounds of the Capitol, either. That might have been a clue.
And it’s like not like the Capitol Police didn’t know what to do or how to do it.
On June 2, 2020, Black Lives Matter held a protest in Washington DC. The Capitol Police and the National Guard showed up like an occupying army, as you can see in the photos from CNN’s report. But on January 6th, they were ordered to stand down.
Remember what these insurrectionist killers hoped — expected — would happen when they attacked our nation’s Capitol on January 6th. What Trump was encouraging them to do and believe.
They thought they could stop the Electoral College vote from being counted, assassinate Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, and that would throw the election into the House of Representatives where, per the 12th Amendment, Republicans would prevail and Donald Trump would be reelected.
Something like that had worked out well twice before for the GOP:
In 1876, even though Democrat Samuel Tilden won both the popular vote and the electoral college vote, the election was thrown to the House and they put Republican Rutherford D. Hayes in as President.
And in 2000, a similar Stop the Steal rally, organized in part by Roger Stone, succeeded in getting the US Supreme Court to stop the Florida recount of the election that a later recount by a news media consortium including the Times showed Al Gore actually won.
The traitors believed that once the election was overturned and Trump was firmly in charge, he’d issue blanket pardons for the insurrectionists and recruit many of them into his private security detail, the same way Hitler, Mussolini and Turkey’s Erdogan all did.
There apparently were even Members of Congress who were complicit in this crime, giving tours to violent traitors in the days before the attack, and even giving clenched-fist salutes and tweeting information about where Nancy Pelosi was during the attack.
They all expected to get off scot-free. Hell, they expected promotions from Trump who would declare martial law (per Mike Flynn) and rule with an iron fist.
The question now is whether people within leadership of the Capitol Police had that same expectation. After all, what other explanation makes sense on its face?
And we shouldn’t rely on a commission that has any Republicans in it to find the truth.
This is a job for serious prosecutors in the Department of Justice and the District of Columbia.
We can do the academic, sanitary work of a commission after the prosecutors are finished. Right now, some people need to go to prison.
This commentary was first posted on HartmannReport.Org
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
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