From Newsgroup: alt.politics.usa

: The following is adapted from a talk delivered at a Hillsdale
: College luncheon in Anchorage, Alaska, on January 22, 2025.

Just hours after his inauguration on January 20, President Trump
pardoned more than 1,500 people convicted of offenses related to the
events of January 6, 2021. He commuted the sentences of fourteen
additional people whose cases for a full pardon are still under review.

Earlier that morning, to less fanfare, President Biden had issued
opreemptive pardonsoua type of presidential pardon with no historical precedent!uto all the members and staff of the House Select Committee
on January 6 and to all the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police
officers who testified before that committee.

What could better illustrate that what happened at the U.S. Capitol on
January 6 has become a political Rorschach test on which Americans
remain deeply divided?

Partisans on the Left accept the official narrative of the Democrats
and the corporate press, believing that January 6 amounted to an
insurrection and a violent attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Partisans on the Right believe that however bad the events of that day
were, the federal governmentAs reaction has been even worse, amounting
to a weaponization of the Department of Justice to criminalize certain political views.

Many ordinary Americans are left wondering what to believe. With those Americans in mind, it is helpful to sift through what we have learned
about January 6 over the past four yearsuand to note the things that we
still donAt know.

The official report of the House Select Committee, which runs to more
than 800 pages, is too deeply biased to give much help. This was
foreordained given the hyper-partisan way the Select Committee was
formed. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected then-House Minority
Leader Kevin McCarthyAs two Republican appointments to the committeeu Representatives Jim Jordan and Jim Banksuand instead appointed two
virulently anti-Trump Republicans, Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

The Select CommitteeAs report, issued in December 2022, omitted
important information about January 6 and failed to address many
lingering questions about the governmentAs role and response. Its
partisan (and specifically anti-Trump) purpose can be deduced from its recommendations: that the Department of Justice pursue criminal charges against Trump and that Congress bar Trump from ever again holding
federal office.

In some instances, the Select Committee showed a blatant disregard for
facts. It claimed, for example, that Trump was aware of violence at the Capitol for more than three hoursu187 minutes, to be exactubefore he
took action to intervene. Cheney referred to this as a osupreme
dereliction of duty.o But in fact, according to a timeline of events
compiled by The New York Times (and corroborated by The Washington
Post), no more than 25 minutes passed between the reported breach of
the Capitol at 2:13 p.m. and TrumpAs first tweet addressing the
situation at 2:38 p.m., when he wrote, oPlease support our Capitol
Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country.
Stay peaceful!o About 30 minutes later, Trump again took to Twitter to
address the demonstrators: oI am asking for everyone at the U.S.
Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of
Law & Orderurespect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank
you!o

More important than the reportAs factual errors are the serious
questions never investigated by the Select Committee. Why did Democrat congressional leaders turn down repeated offers of National Guard
troops to protect the Capitol that day? Why was security so lax outside
the Capitol despite expectations of a large demonstration? How many FBI informants and other undercover federal law enforcement officials were
in the crowd? What communication did the FBI or FBI informants have
with protest organizers ahead of the event? Why wasnAt then-Capitol
Police Chief Steven Sund told there were federal informants in the
crowd? Why did the U.S. Capitol Police open the doors and allow
demonstrators into the building? Why did federal law enforcement
authorities demand cell phone location data for the thousands of people
who were outside the Capitol but broke no laws? Why does the FBI still
have no idea who planted the pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee on
the evening of January 5?

Defenders of the official narrative accuse those who ask such questions
of being conspiracists. But until those questions are answered, our understanding of January 6uno matter our political leaningsuwill be incomplete.

***

Here is what we know happened. On the morning of January 6, 2021, tens
of thousands of Trump supporters gathered for a rally on The Ellipse, a
park south of the White House, to show support for the President and
protest what they believed were irregularities and election fraud that
marred the 2020 election. Trump addressed the crowd and then encouraged
them to march to the U.S. Capitol to protest opeacefully and
patriotically.o Trump never incited the audience or suggested anything
other than peaceful demonstrations. Indeed, many of those present at
The Ellipse had applied for and been issued permits by the Capitol
Police to stage events and host speakers on the U.S. Capitol grounds
that dayua common enough occurrence in Washington, D.C.

Before Trump had even finished speaking, a separate and much smaller
group had already gathered at the Capitol and breached the first set of outdoor barriers. As the main body of peaceful demonstrators made their
way from The Ellipse to the U.S. Capitol grounds, confrontations
between this smaller group and Capitol Police were already underway,
and eventually a riot ensued. The demonstrators marching toward the
Capitol had no way of knowing what was underway while they were still
at The Ellipse watching Trump speak. And owing to the size of the
Capitol groundsusome 23 acresuit was unclear to many, even upon
arriving at the Capitol, what was happening.

Much of what we have learned about this is from more than 40,000 hours
of security footage that had been kept under seal by House Democrat
leadership and excluded from the Select CommitteeAs inquiry. This
security video was released to Tucker Carlson by Speaker of the House
Kevin McCarthy after Republicans took over the majority in the House in
the 2022 midterms. Among other things, it shows clearly that after the
chaos had subsided, U.S. Capitol Police were ushering people into the building. One must presume that many of those who entered the Capitol
during this period were unaware of the earlier clashes with police and assumedubecause police were waving demonstrators along and, in some
cases, even escorting themuthat they were allowed to be there.

The video released by McCarthy included footage of Jacob Chansley, the
oQAnon Shamano who became the face of the oinsurrectiono in the media
and who was sentenced, in the fall of 2021, to 41 months in federal
prison. As many as nine police officers calmly escorted Chansley around
the Capitol complex, at several points even checking for unlocked doors
for him. They did not try to hinder, let alone apprehend him. It also
included footage showing Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who
died on January 7, 2021, walking around and apparently healthy on
January 6. A month after his death, the Washington, D.C. medical
examiner issued a report concluding that Sicknick died of natural
causes. To this day, Democrats and the corporate press cite SicknickAs
death as evidence of their narrative, claiming he died due to blunt
force trauma to the head with a fire extinguisher. The security footage withheld by the Select Committee clearly indicates that this never
happened.

The video also raised questions about who was responsible for failing
to provide adequate police protection for the Capitol. That such a
relatively small group of rioters managed to breach the Capitol is an indictment of those responsible for providing for its securityunamely,
Speaker Pelosi and Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Barred from participating in the Select Committee, House Republicans
conducted their own probe and released a 140-page report in December
2022. It blamed oleadership and law enforcement failureso for making
the Capitol vulnerable and accused former House Sergeant at Arms Paul
Irving of being ocompromised by politics,o coordinating with Pelosi and
her staff while leaving Republican lawmakers out of security
discussions and planning. The report also claimed that Democratic
leaders were concerned about the oopticso of deploying the National
Guard in response to the riot in the aftermath of the Black Lives
Matter riots during the summer of 2020.

Perhaps most puzzling of all was the Capitol Police BoardAs failure to
request National Guard assistance prior to January 6, which, according
to a separate bipartisan Senate report, meant that othe District of
Columbia National Guard was not activated, staged, and prepared to
quickly respond to an attack on the Capitol.o This failure stands out
in part because Trump himself, in the days leading up to January 6, was adamant that 10,000 National Guard troops be deployed ahead of that
dayua fact Cheney concealed by hiding an interview transcript produced
by the Select Committee. TrumpAs request for troops was not only
ignored by Pelosi and Bowser, it was also met with resistance at the
Pentagon, which delayed the deployment of the National Guard and then
covered it up.

The House Republican report also found that police officers were ounder-trained and ill-equipped to protect the Capitol complex. One
officer testified to investigators that he went into the fight . . .
with nothing but his USCP-issued baseball cap. Even if every USCP
officer had been at work that day, their numbers would still have been insufficient to hold off the rioters due to a lack of training and
equipment.o

A December 2024 report from the Justice DepartmentAs Office of the
Inspector General (OIG) is also damning on this point. The FBI, which
was responsible for canvassing the Capitol grounds for potential
security threats or breaches ahead of a major demonstration like the
one planned for January 6, failed to do so and gave no reason why.
Then-FBI Associate Deputy Director Paul Abbate described the lack of canvassing as a obasic step that was missedo and told the OIG he would
have expected a canvassing to have been conducted beforehand through
what the FBI calls the issuance of an ointelligence collection
product.o Such a product was issued for the January 20 inauguration,
but not for January 6.

The OIG report also revealed for the first time that the FBI had 26 confidential human sources, or informants, in the crowd that day. Most
of them went on their own initiative, according to the report, and
three went into the U.S. Capitolua crime for which many otherwise law-
abiding January 6 defendants were sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Incredibly, one of the FBI informants who entered the Capitol was
reimbursed by the FBI for his travel expenses to and from Washington.
The idea that the FBI had informants at the Capitol that day was
previously denounced as a conspiracy theory.

The disclosure about the 26 informants invites further questions about
what other elements of federal law enforcement were present that day
and what exactly they were doing. The video released by McCarthy shows
that Ray Epps, a man who is suspected of being an FBI informant and who
was at the heart of the events of January 6, lied to Congress about his movements. When the Select Committee had him testify in an attempt to
clear his name after footage emerged of him urging the crowd to storm
the Capitol, Epps told committee members that he never entered the
Capitol. He testified that when he texted his nephew at 2:12 p.m. that
day, writing that he had oorchestrated the protests at the Capitol,o he
was already back at his hotel room. But surveillance footage shows this
is not true. Epps remained at the Capitol for half an hour after he
sent that text. Members of the committee knew this but never followed
up.

The mystery surrounding Epps is in some ways representative of
everything we still donAt know about January 6. And to be clear, the
reason we do not know is that efforts to get to the truth have been
actively thwarted. Until that changesuuntil we know all the basic facts
about that dayuAmericans will have no reason to be confident that
justice has been served.

--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2