Six months for the reason that House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol accomplished its work, a far-right ecosystem of true believers has embraced “J6” because the animating power of their lives.
They attend the prison trials of the extra outstanding rioters charged within the assault. They collect to hope and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the outer perimeter of the District of Columbia jail, the place some two dozen defendants are held. Last week, dozens confirmed up at an unofficial House listening to convened by a handful of Republican lawmakers to problem “the fake narrative that an insurrection had occurred on Jan. 6,” as set forth by Jeffrey Clark, a witness on the listening to and a former Justice Department official who labored to undo the outcomes of the 2020 election.
The 90-minute occasion was a through-the-looking-glass various to the damning case towards former President Donald J. Trump offered final yr by the Jan. 6 committee. In the model superior by 5 House Republicans who attended the listening to — Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Ralph Norman, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Troy Nehls — in addition to conservative legal professionals and Capitol riot defendants, Jan. 6 was an elaborate setup to entrap peaceable Trump supporters, adopted by a unbroken Biden administration marketing campaign to imprison and torment harmless conservatives.
Writ giant, their loudest-in-the-room story of persecution somewhat than prosecution is likely to be dismissed as fringe nonsense had it not migrated so swiftly to the center of presidential politics. Mr. Trump has pledged to pardon among the Jan. 6 defendants if he returns to the White House, and his chief challenger for the 2024 Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has signaled he might do the identical.
More than half, or 58 %, of self-described conservatives say that Jan. 6 was an act of “legitimate political discourse” somewhat than a “violent insurrection,” in line with a ballot three months in the past by The Economist/YouGov.
The counternarrative is partly animated by a sequence of significantly stiff sentences for the Jan. 6 defendants, together with one in every of greater than 12 years in jail handed down on Wednesday for a rioter who savagely assaulted a D.C. police officer, Michael Fanone.
The viewers for the listening to within the Capitol Visitor Center included a number of of essentially the most avid and profitable promoters of the Jan. 6 counternarrative.
Among them had been Micki Witthoeft, the mom of Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran and QAnon adherent who was fatally shot by a Capitol police officer through the riot and is now heralded as a martyr by the far proper; Nicole Reffitt, whose husband, Guy Reffitt, was sentenced to greater than seven years in jail for his position within the riot and who now helps manage nightly vigils on the D.C. jail; Tayler Hansen, who has claimed to own videotaped proof of antifa parts instigating the violence on the Capitol, however who didn’t reply to a request from The New York Times to view the footage; and Tommy Tatum of Mississippi, who describes himself as an impartial journalist and has inferred from varied unidentified characters who seem in his personal footage that subtle groups of plainclothes federal brokers orchestrated the breach of the Capitol.
The Jan. 6 deniers vary from true believers to flighty opportunists, with fevered arguments amongst them as to who’s which. Mr. Tatum and William Shipley, a lawyer who has represented greater than 30 Jan. 6 defendants, have for instance accused one another on Twitter of cynical profiteering.
One usually admired throughout the group is Julie Kelly, a former Illinois Republican political guide, cooking class instructor and pandemic lockdown critic who writes for the conservative web site American Greatness. Ms. Kelly has asserted that the Biden administration is “on a destructive crusade to exact revenge against supporters of Donald Trump” and has accused Mr. Fanone, who was overwhelmed unconscious by the rioters on the Capitol, of being a “crisis actor.” She was a frequent visitor on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time present earlier than Fox fired him in April.
Last month, aides to Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Ms. Kelly and two different conservative writers, John Solomon of Just the News and Joseph M. Hanneman of The Epoch Times, permission to ferret via the Capitol’s voluminous Jan. 6 safety footage, the one journalists aside from Mr. Carlson to acquire such entry.
In an interview the day earlier than the House listening to, Ms. Kelly mentioned she was scouring the video in hopes of studying the provenance of the notorious gallows that had been seen on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. “Did Trump supporters go there and build that? I doubt it,” she mentioned. Ms. Kelly additionally hopes to study whether or not nefarious “agitators” had been already contained in the Capitol earlier than the breach. She variously termed Jan. 6 “an inside job” and a “fed-surrection.”
Ms. Kelly recounted a gathering she and a fellow supporter of Jan. 6 defendants, Cynthia Hughes, had final September with Mr. Trump at his golf membership in Bedminster, N.J. She mentioned she advised the previous president that the defendants felt deserted by him: “They’re saying to me: ‘We were there for him. Why isn’t he here for us?’” Ms. Hughes knowledgeable Mr. Trump that the federal judges he appointed had been “among the worst” when it got here to the therapy of the riot defendants.
Surprised, Mr. Trump replied, “Well, I got recommendations from the Federalist Society.” Ms. Kelly mentioned he then requested, “What do you want me to do?” She replied that he might donate to Ms. Hughes’s group, the Patriot Freedom Project, which gives monetary help to the defendants. Mr. Trump’s Save America PAC subsequently gave $10,000 to the group.
Others within the ecosystem contend that Mr. Trump’s contribution to the trigger is manifest by the slings and arrows he has himself suffered since that day. “I call him Jan. Sixth-er Number One,” mentioned Joseph D. McBride, maybe essentially the most seen of the legal professionals representing the defendants. “He’s under the gun. He’s being investigated and indicted.”
Mr. McBride’s purchasers embrace Richard Barnett, who posed for {a photograph} together with his foot on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, in addition to Ryan Nichols, who exhorted fellow protesters to focus on elected officers, yelling, “Cut their heads off!”
Mr. McBride additionally represented two Stop the Steal rally organizers subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee, Ali Alexander and Alex Bruesewitz. It was Mr. Bruesewitz who launched Mr. McBride to Donald Trump Jr., which led to a number of invites to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s membership in Palm Beach, Fla.
“I’ve lost count at this point,” Mr. McBride mentioned, including that the membership “is a good place to network.”
Mr. McBride was additionally a frequent visitor on Mr. Carlson’s present, together with the time he claimed {that a} mysterious man seen on the Capitol on Jan. 6 together with his face obscured in purple paint was “clearly a law enforcement officer.” Shown proof later that week by a HuffPost reporter that the person was a widely known habitué of St. Louis Cardinals baseball video games, Mr. McBride replied: “If I’m wrong, so be it, bro. I don’t care.”
He did acknowledge a sure dubiousness to the declare that the largely white male conservatives who confirmed up on the Capitol on Jan. 6 had the judicial deck stacked towards them.
“Pre-Jan. 6, anytime you heard the term ‘two-tier system of justice,’ it’s Blacks, it’s Latinos, it’s the infringed, it’s the poor, it’s the drug addicted, it’s the marginalized, it’s the L.G.B.T.Q. community,” he mentioned. That coalition of victims, Mr. McBride insisted, now included the MAGA supporters he represented.
Insha Rahman, the vp for advocacy and partnerships on the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit targeted on prison justice reform, agrees, up to some extent. Mr. McBride and the others are elevating “unfortunately a fact of life for over two million Americans who are behind bars,” mentioned Ms. Rahman, who has visited the D.C. jail a number of occasions and concurs that its circumstances are inhumane, although no worse, she mentioned, than detention amenities in Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston.
Still, she mentioned, the privileges afforded the Jan. 6 pretrial detainees of their specific wing — particular person cells, a library, contact visits, the power to take part in podcasts — “are not at all typical.”
“But I don’t want to call that special treatment,” Ms. Rahman mentioned. “That’s the floor for what every incarcerated person in America should have a right to expect.”
For now, the protagonists of the choice Jan. 6 narrative are usually not significantly targeted on jail reform. Nor are they prepared to surrender.
As Mr. McBride mentioned: “Do I think we’ll ever get to the bottom of it? We still haven’t solved the J.F.K. assassination.”
Source: www.nytimes.com