The Overzealous Prosecutors of January 6

            “Government,” observed the 14th century Arab political theorist Ibn Khaldoun, “is an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself.” Draconian prison sentences handed down to those involved in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot highlight this truism.

            Though he didn’t enter the Capitol that day, Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, 57, received 18 years in federal prison for seditious conspiracy under a law whose retrograde origins and vague definition ought to worry those who care about due process. Florida chapter leader Kelly Megg will serve 12 years for the same offense. Peter Schwartz, 49, who attacked police officers at the Capitol with a chair and then chemical spray, got 14 years. Richard Barnett, who was photographed with his feet resting on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, received 4½ years. The Department of Justice has obtained prison sentences in at least 250 of the thousand-plus January 6th-related cases it is prosecuting. DOJ is also undermining defendants’ ability to hire attorneys, by asking judges to issue fines big enough to offset donations to legal-defense funds.

            Like most Americans, I am disgusted by the events of January 6th. The rioters rioted without cause even to protest; there was insufficient evidence of irregularities in the 2020 election to believe Biden hadn’t won. Many of them succumbed to idiotic nonsense; they believed in QAnon and Pizzagate. Too many were xenophobic, racist, homophobic partisans of the far right, the embodiment of what the historian Richard Hofstadter described as the paranoid style in American politics. Rhodes, who also participated in the 2014 standoff by far-right anti-government extremists at the Bundy Ranch, would probably despise me and my left-wing politics. (Though, you never know. Rhodes’ Oath Keepers supported Edward Snowden.)

            I abhor the defendants and their politics, as well as their actions on January 6th. Yet I can see that the events of that day, shocking as they were, have been exaggerated by Democrats and their media allies in order to gain partisan advantage. Now they are being punished beyond reason.

A reasonable person cannot conclude that these punishments fits the crime. The average prison term for a person convicted of murder in the United States is 17½ years. The average term for rape is seven years. Nothing Rhodes did, in the aggregate, comes close to taking a life—yet he will go behind bars for the same period of time as a stone-cold killer. Appropriate January 6th charges would include burglary, trespassing and vandalism and, in cases like those who called for violence against government officials, menacing. Rhodes, however, was sentenced as a terrorist.

His real offense was challenging the authority of the government at its seat of power.

Prosecutorial discretion and the inherent non-uniformity of sentencing judges ensure that there will be a range of prison terms for defendants convicted of similar offenses, and that certain crimes that seem less serious will result in harsher verdicts. But a criminal justice system worthy of its name should strive for internal consistency and fairness whether its overall tenor is lenient or harsh. The January 6th sentences do not meet that standard.

The riot caused $1.5 million worth of damage to the Capitol building, the same amount New York City paid to renovate a nondescript children’s playground in Harlem. One Capitol Hill police officer died, the following day. The coroner attributed his passing to natural causes; prosecutors did not file charges against anyone in that incident. One cop lost the tip of a finger and others suffered concussions—unacceptable to be sure, yet far short of what one might expect. As riots and insurrections go video and photo evidence make clear that January 6th was hardly the full-scale attempt to overthrow the republic portrayed by Democrats.

Charges and convictions were appropriate, just not at this level. Years-long sentences against nonviolent offenders suggests that prosecutors were less interested in holding wrongdoers accountable than sending an unmistakable message: don’t mess with us.

            The prosecution of Barnett, the man who invaded Pelosi’s office, notes that he left her a note calling her a “bitch.” “Court documents also state that Barnett had a stun gun in his pants while in the speaker’s office and that he took an envelope from the office,” CNN reported. “Prosecutors said he left the Capitol showing the envelope to other rioters like it was a ‘trophy.’”  An unused stun gun? A crude message? An envelope? Four and a half years?

            Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 manifesto On Crime and Punishments set a philosophical ideal for justice in Western Europe, a standard enshrined in constitutions that was so influential it inspired the title of Dostoevsky’s great novel. “In order that punishment should not be an act of violence perpetrated by one or many upon a private citizen,” Beccaria concluded, “it is essential that it should be…the minimum possible in the given circumstances.”

            When prosecutors and judges impose excessively harsh punishments, they cede the moral high ground to those they seek to condemn. The convicted are transformed into aggrieved parties while the government feeds into their narrative that it is vindictive and oppressive. “I consider every J 6er to be a political prisoner because all of them are grossly overcharged,” Stewart Rhodes told U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta at his sentencing hearing.

            “You’re not a political prisoner, Mr. Rhodes,” the judge retorted.

            Of course he is.

            (Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

Why Derek Chauvin Was Charged in the First Place

After a jury convicted Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd by choking him to death with his knee, many people said that the verdict would set a precedent that would hold police officers accountable in the future. But they are forgetting what it really took to lead to Chauvin getting charged in the first place.

Congress Votes to Arm Violent Mobs That Storm through Capitols around the World

Kyrgyzstan's second tulip revolution | Kyrgyzstan | The Guardian

            Terrified political leaders watched the police who were assigned to protect them melt away. They fled as an angry mob of hooligans, riled up by sketchy allegations of rigged elections, stormed up the stairs of the government building that hosted the debates and deliberations of their venerable democracy. The rioters, reactionary right-wingers from the nation’s rural hinterlands, rampaged through the corridors of power, smashing windows, vandalizing offices and looting files and furniture.

            Political elites deplored the physical appearance and comportment of the protesters. “I’d like to believe and hope that the actions of a mob high on narcotic substances will not totally destabilize this republic,” remarked a top official of a neighboring country.

            This scene didn’t take place at the Capitol. It occurred at the “White House,” the seat of parliament and the presidential staff in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.

In March 2005, the mob got its way. President Askar Akayev, the only leader of a former Soviet republic in Central Asia to have been democratically elected, fled into exile. The Tulip Revolution, as Western news media approvingly dubbed the coup, prompted the all-but-total collapse of the country’s economy and politics into chaos so intense that parts of the country have become a failed state where currency has stopped circulating. When I entered via Tajikistan in 2009, the illiterate border guards didn’t even have a stamp in order to mark my passport.

Stability remains elusive. Mobs similarly toppled Akayev’s successor Kurmanbek Bakiyev in 2010 and, in a barely noticed bit of international drama eclipsed by the U.S. election, Bakiyev’s replacement in October 2020.

Those Kyrgyz mobs of Muslim young men from the conservative Ferghana Valley didn’t materialize by chance in 2005. They were trained and funded by you and me.

Scores of CIA agents permanently stationed in southern Kyrgyzstan trained a bunch of hicks to overthrow a northern-based secular government that had annoyed the Bush Administration. The Akayev regime’s real sin? Not fixing an election. It was their demand for higher rent payments from the U.S. to use Bishkek’s airport as a base for bombing runs into Afghanistan.

“It would have been absolutely impossible for [the overthrow of Akayev] to have happened without that help [from the U.S.],” said Edil Baisolov, who led an NGO financed by the U.S. government. Freedom House, a CIA cover operation masquerading as an NGO, published anti-Akayev newspapers. The U.S. Congress allocated $12 million a year under the Freedom Support Act toward undermining Central Asia’s sole democracy.

“Hundreds of thousands more filter into pro-democracy programs in the country from other United States government-financed institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy. That does not include the money for the Freedom House printing press or Kyrgyz-language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a pro-democracy broadcaster,” reported The New York Times. Bakiyev, the president who took over after the coup forced Akayev to flee, was himself trained in the U.S.

American media outlets loved the Kyrgyz insurrection. They grouped it with other CIA-backed “color revolutions” against the governments of Ukraine and Georgia, spinning the overthrow of Akayev, an intellectual physicist, as the liberation of the people from an authoritarian despot.

So please excuse me if I don’t shed geysers of tears over the traumas endured by the pampered lobbyist-fattened members of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate while idiots wearing horned Viking masks desecrated the hallowed hallways of the Capitol.

What happened on January 6th is infinitely less than chickens coming home to roost. A few hours of mayhem is but a tiny taste of the far greater violence and misery those 535 men and women vote to inflict on countries around the world. According to one study, the United States interfered overtly or covertly in the free elections of 81 foreign countries between 1946 and 2000. The U.S. tried to overthrow the president of Venezuela in 2002, invaded Afghanistan and Iraq where it replaced the local governments with puppet regimes, set off a war within the Palestinian Authority by trying to get rid of Hamas in 2006, and is currently trying to destroy Yemen, Syria, Iran and Libya, which thanks to the U.S. has become a failed state. This is by necessity a truncated list.

Here is true American exceptionalism. Our Congress throws billions of dollars a year at regime change operations around the globe but, with the exception of events like the 9/11 attacks, nothing happens here. Blowback is infrequent, relatively small-scale and never directly impacts the people who are responsible, i.e. the political class. Given that one of the few things Democrats and Republicans still agree upon is to finance the cash-bloated military, I don’t see that changing.

It would be nice, however, for the members of Congress who finance and arm the rampaging mobs that illegally overthrow the sovereign governments of other countries to take it on the chin when the same thing kind of, sort of, almost happens to them.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

First They Came for the Dirty Hipsters

President Trump deployed paramilitary goon squads to Portland and other American cities in order to harass peaceful protesters. Fascism has officially arrived in the United States. But reaction from Joe Biden and ordinary Americans remain muted.

No Country for Old Airline Passengers

The U.S. Senate voted down an amendment that almost every American could have approved of heartily, a Chuck Schumer-sponsored measure that would have allowed the FAA to tell airlines to stop packing passengers into planes like sardines. At a time like this can anyone doubt that this isn’t a democracy?

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