America’s New Political Prisoners

Loading

by LEE SMITH

Last week the Department of Justice brought its first insurrectionist to justice. A 49-year-old Indiana grandmother of five who walked into the Capitol Building through an open door on Jan. 6 and wandered around for 10 minutes pleaded guilty to “parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building.” For her crime, she was sentenced to three years of probation, $500 in restitution, and 40 hours of community service. Given that President Biden has called Jan. 6 the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,” how did she get off so easy?
 

Her court-appointed lawyer had her read and watch Bury My Heart at Wounded KneeJust Mercy, and Schindler’s List, evidence that she was on her way to renouncing her white privilege. What does racism and exterminationist antisemitism have to do with the nonviolent crime she committed? Nothing, of course. The Biden administration sees Jan. 6 as a platform to criminalize its opponents, and the only way out for Donald Trump supporters is to confess to thought-crimes.
 

But wait, America isn’t the kind of country that puts nonviolent offenders into reeducation camps. It wouldn’t hold dozens of citizens without bail for having the wrong political beliefs or attending political demonstrations. Federal law enforcement agencies exist to protect Americans from dangerous criminals, not to frame people for political crimes defined by a powerful elite. The Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn’t call on Americans to turn in their neighbors for supporting the wrong political candidate. That kind of stuff may happen in third-world countries, but the idea that America would use courts, secret police, intelligence agencies, and the media to prosecute political warfare against other Americans sounds like the drug-riddled account of a bad 1960s-era acid trip. Sure, that’s when the FBI launched COINTELPRO and tapped Martin Luther King Jr.’s phones and sent letters to his wife, but the Church Committee put an end to all that. Didn’t it?
 

Last week, families of the Jan. 6 detainees held at the Correctional Treatment Facility in Washington, D.C., relayed that authorities imposed severe lockdowns in retaliation for Mark Levin’s Sunday night Fox show, which raised questions about the ongoing prosecutions related to the “deadly insurrection” of Jan. 6, 2021. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.) and journalist Julie Kelly, one of the only reporters who has interviewed the detainees and their families extensively, had appeared on Levin’s show to discuss the case’s ever-growing irregularities.
 

Kelly, a reporter for the right-leaning publication American Greatness, has been writing for months about the treatment of the detainees, some of whom have been held in prison without bail for months. “There have been no trials, no convictions, but pretrial detentions for dozens of cases,” Kelly told me in an interview. That includes first-time offenders charged with nonviolent crimes who are being held without bail because they protested Biden’s victory. “Judges are signing off on the detentions, contending that because the detainees don’t believe Biden was legitimately elected, they therefore won’t follow U.S. law or obey its court system, and that makes them a danger to society.”
 

“The outrage,” said Kelly, “is that the Justice Department seeks pretrial detention for nonviolent defenders for their involvement in what increasingly looks like an inside job.”
 

Indeed there is growing belief in some circles, left as well as right, that federal law enforcement not only infiltrated the Jan. 6 groups but may have directed some of their actions. That’s the argument made by Darren Beattie, another journalist who has been covering the Jan. 6 arrests and charges. A former professor of political philosophy who worked as a speechwriter in the Trump administration, Beattie is the publisher of Revolver News, an internet news site that aggregates stories from the conservative media and features original reporting. His recent article asks if the FBI played a role in stoking the violence during the Jan. 6 protest.
 

Beattie sees similarities linking Jan. 6 to the summer 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. An FBI agent was allegedly responsible for the Michigan group’s transportation, another was the group’s contact for explosives, and an informant was responsible for security. It appears that without the FBI there would have been no plot.
 

Beattie notes that at least one of the government’s informants in the Michigan case was not identified as such in court documents, and wonders if any of the figures identified in the Jan. 6 indictments were agents or informants, too. They appear to have committed acts as bad or worse than those indicted, and there is no evidence of plea bargains—so why weren’t they charged with similar offenses? Beattie also points out that the same FBI agent who took down the anti-Whitmer conspirators now oversees the Jan. 6 investigations. In October, Steven D’Antuono, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Detroit field office, was rewarded with a promotion and named assistant director in charge of the Washington, D.C., field office.
 



 

Why the FBI is facilitating or even committing crimes is part of the legacy of Sept. 11. Along with the massive surveillance of U.S. citizens that led to the FBI’s illegal spying on the 2016 Trump campaign, this is yet another unconstitutional kink in the justice system that was introduced by the global war on terror. What that meant in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was federal law enforcement putting young Muslim men in the middle of terror plots and then busting them.
 

In a recent essay on Jan. 6, journalist Glenn Greenwald noted the many cases “where the FBI targeted some young American Muslims they viewed as easily manipulated—due to financial distress, emotional problems, or both—and then deployed informants and undercover agents to dupe them into agreeing to join terrorist plots that had been created, designed and funded by the FBI itself, only to then congratulate themselves for breaking up the plot which they themselves initiated.”
 

Now they’re using the same methods on Trump supporters. Why? In a separate article, Greenwald argued that Jan. 6 is behind the U.S. military leadership’s sudden interest in critical race theory:
 

To justify the current domestic War on Terror that has already provoked billions more in military spending and intensified domestic surveillance, the Pentagon must ratify the narrative that those they are fighting in order to defend the homeland are white supremacist domestic terrorists. That will not work if white supremacists are small in number or weak and isolated in their organizing capabilities. To serve the war machine’s agenda, they must pose a grave, pervasive and systemic threat.

Greenwald is right. Counterterrorism is a multibillion-dollar Beltway industry, filling a trough that feeds Republican and Democratic constituencies including the State Department, spy services, and Washington-area NGOs and think tanks. As America downsizes its presence in the Middle East, national security bureaucrats and their parasitical private sector partners fear shrinking budgets. Hence the big move from countering violent extremism in Muslim communities to confronting “domestic terrorists.” The system has readily adapted to the new model as counterterror experts have plugged in the same keywords—radicalization, self-radicalization, lone wolves—for what is essentially the same enterprise. All they’ve done is replace brown teenagers with white middle-age Midwesterners.
 

But wanting to keep the money flowing is not the only reason the national security bureaucracy and its media partners are targeting Trump supporters. The Biden administration embodies the interests of America’s increasingly powerful oligarchy, comprising the corporate as well as the political establishment. This class represents glaringly small segments of the country like tech workers, teachers unions, and cultural elites. The oligarchs have incentivized street gangs from antifa, Black Lives Matter, and pro-Palestinian antisemites to weaponize their resentments by turning them loose on the Democratic stragglers unlikely to support initiatives at odds with their own interests, like defunding urban police forces.
 

Using law enforcement as public sector proxies for their campaign of political warfare, Democratic Party officials are employing a similar tactic. By turning the justice system loose on their opponents, they send a general warning to anyone foolish enough to stand against them. That is why the Biden administration has made a point of treating the nonviolent Jan. 6 offenders more harshly than other Americans who have come to the Capitol to exercise their First Amendment rights. We brought the system down on the head of a nonviolent grandmother for walking through an open door. You might be next.
 

Administration officials and Democratic Party colleagues like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi regularly refer to Jan. 6 as the greatest act of political violence to hit the homeland since 9/11—or, according to Attorney General Merrick Garland, since the Oklahoma City bombing. The obvious difference of course is the level of bloodshed. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks; 168 died in the April 19, 1995, bombing of the FBI building in Oklahoma City. During the Jan. 6 protest, only one person was killed: an unarmed Trump supporter named Ashli Babbitt who was shot in the neck by a law enforcement officer whose identity is still being concealed by local and federal authorities.
 

The roughly four-hour-long Jan. 6 protest is also distinct from these other tragedies because, outside of America’s domestic intelligence apparatus, no one really knows what happened after hundreds of thousands of Americans rallied in Washington to support the losing presidential candidate. Nearly half a year after the demonstration authorities still won’t release the 14,000 hours of footage held by the Capitol Police.
 

Nor will law enforcement authorities share the footage with the detainees’ lawyers, most of whom are public defenders (many of the defendants cannot afford legal counsel). Naturally, they want to know if the footage includes evidence helpful to their clients. But according to authorities the footage is too sensitive to release, and judges are signing off on protective orders to withhold the video from defense counsel and the public. Lawyers for the Capitol Police fear it would be “passed on to those who might wish to attack the Capitol again.”
 

Meanwhile, law enforcement authorities have regularly leaked selectively edited cuts of the footage to cast the Jan. 6 protesters in the worst possible light. For instance, social media posts relayed through chosen media organizations show protesters threatening, charging, or striking officers, but not Capitol Police attacking peaceful protesters, which Kelly said she’s seen.
 

“Leaked clips show one Trump supporter, a former New York City police officer, screaming insults at Capitol Hill police and attacking, but they’re not showing what happened before,” said Kelly. “One of the officers punched him, cold-cocked him. That’s why he was challenging them.” The videos, she says, show police using pepper spray and flash bangs. “Those let off big clouds of smoke. They’re using them not just to provoke the protesters, but to create the optics of the Capitol under clouds of smoke.”
 

Virtually every leading detail of Jan. 6 that the press has reported is false. There were not five people who died during the protests at the Capitol. There was only, Ashli Babbitt, and after a cursory investigation by the D.C. Metro Police, the DOJ closed the case with no charges. Furthermore, it was not an armed insurrection. To date there is no evidence that protesters brought firearms into the Capitol Building, where only one shot was fired—the one that killed Babbitt.

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
1 Comment
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

“authorities imposed severe lockdowns in retaliation for Mark Levin’s Sunday night Fox show, which raised questions about the ongoing prosecutions related to the “deadly insurrection” of Jan. 6, 2021.”

Sort of reminiscent of the Nazis killing 10 citizens for every Wehrmacht soldier killed by partisans. Like the fascist attempt to suppress partisan opposition by punishing innocents, so this fascist regime tries to suppress informing the public of their police state tactics by punishing the victims held in custody.