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Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration is still trying to quell the last effects of the January 6, 2021 attack on the White House.
What happened? On Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to throw out sedition and other convictions against 12 defendants involved in the Jan. 6 riots, in which Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to support his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. injuring about 140 police officers in the process.
The request is the first step in a process that may result in charges related to January 6 being dropped against the defendants.
Who are the rioters? All 12 are members of one of two far-right militant groups: The Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. And all 12, along with two other rebels, were overturned by Trump on his first day back in office. Trump pardoned more than 1,500 other defendants on January 6 directly.
What is the context? Trump and his administration have long sought to rewrite the history of the attack, portraying its perpetrators as wrongfully prosecuted victims. On the five-year anniversary of the invasion earlier this year, His palace argued that “it was the Democrats who did the real rebellion” and accused the police of “increas(d) tensions” with the rebels. (Neither is true.)
Why this matter? Tuesday’s request by the DOJ changes nothing real for the defendants who stand to be released on their sentences, since they were not already facing another prison term.
But it should not be ignored either. Some of the defendants were already acquitted — “in the interest of justice,” according to Trump’s DOJ — they defended the violence above and beyond what happened on January 6.
One of them, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, said shortly after the attack that “we should have brought in a gun (on Jan. 6). We could have fixed it right there. I would have hung (Speaker Nancy) Pelosi from a lamppost.”
And so, it’s time to leave…
Have a good evening, and we’ll see you here tomorrow!
