Not a mere parking ticket

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

Consequences:

Last week’s storming of the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob has already resulted in charges against 70 people, according to the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who said he expects the number “will grow into the hundreds.”

In the first public briefing by the Justice Department and the FBI since Wednesday’s riot, acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin and Steven D’Antuono, director of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, outlined what Sherwin called a long-term investigation.

“Everyone is in for the long haul,” Sherwin said.

He said his office has already opened 170 subject files of people who potentially committed crimes in the Capitol or on Capitol grounds.

You mean it’s illegal to smash windows, batter locked doors open, push through police barricades, smash people in the head with fire extinguishers? Even when the president told you to?

He said the crimes include “everything from trespass, to theft of mail, to theft of digital devices inside the Capitol, to assault on local officers, federal officers both outside and inside the Capitol, to the theft of potential national security information or national defense information, to felony murder, even civil rights, excessive force investigations.”

Sherwin added, “The gamut of cases and criminal conduct we’re looking at is really mind-blowing.”

He said what he called a “strike force” has been formed to build sedition and conspiracy cases against some suspects.

But sedition on behalf of Trump is patriotic and maga-enabling, isn’t it?

Comments

6 responses to “Not a mere parking ticket”

  1. zubanel Avatar
    zubanel

    I thought criming while white was considered a sport now. They should have been told they could get in trouble.

  2. zubanel Avatar
    zubanel

    Well it still might turn out to be. The same folks who are in charge last week are in charge this week. It’s Saturday morning cartoon time! Characters get clobbered but never hurt!

  3. Your Name's not Bruce? Avatar
    Your Name’s not Bruce?

    Maybe some of these charges should reference Trump’s Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence

    https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-protecting-american-monuments-memorials-statues-combating-recent-criminal-violence/

    In the midst of these attacks, many State and local governments appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between the lawful exercise of rights to free speech and assembly and unvarnished vandalism. They have surrendered to mob rule, imperiling community safety, allowing for the wholesale violation of our laws, and privileging the violent impulses of the mob over the rights of law-abiding citizens. Worse, they apparently have lost the will or the desire to stand up to the radical fringe and defend the fundamental truth that America is good, her people are virtuous, and that justice prevails in this country to a far greater extent than anywhere else in the world. Some particularly misguided public officials even appear to have accepted the idea that violence can be virtuous and have prevented their police from enforcing the law and protecting public monuments, memorials, and statues from the mob’s ropes and graffiti.

  4. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Good reminder.

  5. tigger_the_wing Avatar
    tigger_the_wing

    YNnB, that looks as if it could have been written in response to last Wednesday’s insurrection.

    Or it was DARVO, because Donnie knew what he was planning…

  6. Brian M Avatar
    Brian M

    Gawd, that proclamation/law is nauseatingly self-regarding. I don’t believe half of it. “We’re Number One! We’re Number One! ” is the language of a high school pep rally. And I detested those when I was a wee ‘un.

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