Law Enforcement

Thoughts on J6 Pardons and Investigations

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I am in favor of a pardon for J6 protesters, but not all of them. Which ones? Those who posed no threat. Those not convicted or charged with assault or other violent offenses (with one possible exception – see next paragraph), or for inciting violent behavior (like John Earle Sullivan). Ray Epps still hasn’t been thoroughly investigated, so he should not receive a pardon.

The case of Rachel Powell must be reviewed carefully. She claims she broke a window to flee a dangerous situation created by an attack by Capitol defenders that had protesters pressed in a confined area. If there is a strong case for her self-defense argument, pardon her.

The pardon decision must reflect zero tolerance of violence other than justifiable self-defense. The pardon announcement must call attention to prosecutorial abuse, excessively lengthy pretrial detention, and pretrial prison conditions.

Now, on to J6 investigations. Here’s my not-necessarily-comprehensive to-do list.

A highly detailed sequence of events. If military history buffs can put together detailed videos of major battles pinpointing the positions of individual units at specific times, the same can be accomplished here. I want a series of maps in print or video format that show time and location of every single violent incident, whether fomented by the public- or private-sector, and other incidents of note (e.g. pipe bomb discoveries, Senate recess, the moment Capitol security started allowing entry into the building, Trump’s “go home” tweet, Jacob Chansley announcing said tweet), and that also show the location of key persons of interest at those times. This exercise should be valuable to various investigations, and will give the public a better sense of when and where rioting and other violence occurred. I suspect that many people imagine four solid hours of rioting, far more violence than actually occurred. I’m also curious to know how many people who heard the end of Trump’s speech entered the building. Given the walking distance, they would not have arrived yet when windows were being bashed in.

A request for private citizens to submit videos that have not yet been submitted. There may still be some videos out there that haven’t been tuned in out of fear of being railroaded by Biden’s DoJ.

The pipe bombs. Who planted them, and were they subjected to forensic analysis after the Feds exploded the devices? Since they were fitted with one-hour kitchen timers and placed many hours prior to discovery, the bombs either had a different trigger mechanism that wasn’t visible, or no trigger mechanism at all. The latter alternative calls into question whether the bombs even had explosives. They could have been filled with Clairol for all we know.

The use of tear gas and its possible role in inciting violence. Some tear gas rounds were fired deep into the peaceable section of the crowd, as witnessed by J. Michael Waller and documented in this video (first round visible at 1:02).

The decision to allow entry into the building. Who authorized it? At which entrances was entry allowed? I am vaguely aware of a claim that the rioting was mostly on one side of the building and allowed entry was on the other. I’d like some confirmation on that.

The shooting death of Ashli Babbitt.

The death of Rosanne Boyland.

The origins of the hoax that Brian Sicknick was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher.

The gallows prop. Who built it, and who decided it should not be torn down once it was up? People need to be fired over this.

All other conduct of Capitol defenders.

Prison conditions for J6 protesters in pretrial detention. Inspection teams should be ready to descend on the prison(s) two seconds after Trump takes the oath of office.

Prosecution of J6 defendants. One special concern is the decision to charge about 250 J6 defendants under an evidence tampering provision under Sarbanes-Oxley. How was this decision made? Did anyone in the loop doubt that the statute was genuinely relevant to those cases? Those convictions have since been shot down by SCOTUS. One has to imagine how someone could get the idea that a law concerned with addressing accounting shenanigans could be applied to protesters.

The J6 committee and Jack Smith. Obligatory mention. One issue I’d like to see settled: since the full committee never met, did it have subpoena authority? If not, the cases of those convicted of defying subpoenas should be appealed, not pardoned.

2024 Election Plus/Delta

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Pluses: admittedly much the shorter list, but we did resolve a few things.

  1. Thanks mainly to vote shifts in California and New York, the popular vote outcome was not at variance with the Electoral College vote, and it wasn’t particularly close (over 4-1/2 million votes).
  2. Largely as a result, the losing side, and VP Harris herself, have indicated cooperation with formal certification and transition processes.
  3. Harris is gone. She’ll get a chunk of money for a book and retire to the lecture circuit.
  4. Walz, same, and given the likelihood that he would have been a 21st-century version of Henry Wallace, with Chinese instead of Soviet agents in his inner circle, that might be more important than getting rid of Harris.
  5. Taking a somewhat longer view, Trump is gone too (perhaps not a much longer view; see the final Delta item below).
  6. By extension, there is some chance that ’28 will not have the electorate choosing between a crook and an idiot for President.
  7. Whatever one may think of prediction markets, and there are arguments on both sides regarding their functionality, the biggest prediction market of all, the US stock market, was forecasting a Trump victory all year (not coincidentally, the same thing happened in 2016).
  8. By the way, the media will actually report negative economic news now.
  9. I could have put this in either category, but I’ll leave it here: your Cluebat of the Day is a reminder that Trump is as old as Biden was in ’20, and notwithstanding some of my more apprehensive items below, to expect anything much of him is a waste of time.
  10. Likely continuation of relatively good space-industry policy across Administrations, which should be the only thing that matters several decades from now.

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Literary Life

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(A break from the election, for those who can bear to tear themselves away from contemplating Tuesday’s Presidential Election, and the judicial murder of squirrels.)

I was briefly nonplussed when a question for me showed up on my message stack on Quora last week – what did I think of Sally Rooney’s not allowing her books to be translated into Hebrew or be published and distributed in Israel, and demanding that other authors insist on the same. All because of Israeli treatment of the poor, poor, pitiful Palestinians in Gaza. My initial reaction was – who the hell is Sally Rooney?
(Subsequent brief pause for a look-up and a review of sample chapters of her books on Amazon.) Oh, that’s … precious. An Irish millennial with popular literary credentials, much lauded in the correct circles, describing the landscape of a generational navel with exquisitely elaborate original prose of the sort much favored by jaded teachers of creative writing. Four books with pretty much the same plot, it would appear, noted as a significant voice of her generation – a kind of literary Lena Dunham. Also a fashionably self-proclaimed Marxist, which is weird because that type never actually chooses to live in a place currently being run under strict Marxist lines. Curious, that. More importantly for this discussion, a raving antisemite, or as I prefer to spell it in the interests of bald accuracy, a Jew-hater. As an aside, it has always struck me as a peculiarly Irish quality, to rush into a full-body embrace with any movement perceived to be an enemy of their enemy, on the somewhat questionable grounds that an enemy of your old enemy must therefore be an acceptable ally to you. (This explains how Southern Ireland remained a neutral in WWII, while radical IRA members collaborated with Nazi Germany at the time, and decades later took funding from Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi.)

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Poor Mexico …

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… so far from God, so close to the United States, went the comment attributed to one of their presidents. Mexico was very close to us, when I was growing up in suburban Los Angeles in the 1960s and early 70s. My elementary school had us study Mexican history in the 6th grade if I remember correctly, that was part of the unified school district curriculum. We did a field trip to Olvera St., in the old part of downtown, at least three of the old Spanish missions were within a short drive from our various homes, and we weren’t allowed to forget that Los Angeles itself had Spanish origins and Mexican governance for decades before American statehood. For Southern California, Mexico was just a hop, skip, and a jump away just as it is for South Texas.

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Fever

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A fever, so the doctors and medical experts tell us, is a symptom of a deeper issue; an illness which most often is a mild and fleeting thing. And then, there is the serious and life-threatening fever in either case, a fever is a way of telling us that something is wrong, and we’d best pay attention.

Just such an indication in the body politic is the occurrence of vigilante groups a kind of civic fever, an indication that civic adjudication the administration of justice in the case of offenses against law and order to the satisfaction of those offended by crime has become seriously out of whack. It is a purely human drive; if one has been harmed by the unlawful actions of another, one would prefer to be assured that justice has been served and if not made whole again, at the very least satisfied that the offender has been properly chastised for their offense.

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