Little evidence the Capitol riot was coup attempt
The House Select Committee on the January 6 attack on the United States has been busy this summer pulling together evidence that the rioters that day were trying to overthrow the United States government or, at the very least, overturn the results of the election.
But according to the FBI’s investigation, there is very little evidence of any kind that the riot was some massive, right-wing plot to bring down the government.
“Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases,” said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. “Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages.”
The FBI found that small groups of Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys were planning to break into the Capitol, but the Bureau could find no evidence that the mouth-breathers had any plans for what to do once they were inside. …
Perhaps the Democrats can now refrain from implicating Donald Trump as a ringleader of the whole conspiracy. …
In public comments last month to the Democratic-led congressional committee formed to investigate the violence, police officers injured in the mayhem urged lawmakers to determine whether Trump helped instigate it. Some Democrats have said they want him to testify.
But the FBI has so far found no evidence that he or people directly around him were involved in organizing the violence, according to the four current and former law enforcement officials.
Here’s what we wrote in the aftermath of the riots:
Tens of millions of Americans sense that they’ve been manipulated.
Then came the January 6 rally at the Capitol. What happened then—and especially what has happened since—has been America’s Reichstag fire.
January 6 was the day that representatives and senators met in the Senate Chamber to sign their names and their honor to the certification of an illegitimate vote. It was also the day that hundreds of thousands of Americans came to Washington—in spite of social media manipulation and censorship, in spite of D.C. businesses closing their doors to them—to protest the subversion of the Constitution and their fundamental right to govern themselves through elected representatives.
The day would end in tragedy.
The Capitol riot—and how it has been manipulated over the past three weeks—reminds a lot of people of what happened at the Reichstag in 1933. Someone (we still don’t know who) burned the Reichstag, seat of the national legislature, virtually gutting it. For Germans, this was a national tragedy—but nothing like the national tragedy that followed as a result. Despite reports that he himself might have been connected to the arson, the new leader of Germany clamped down on those reports, used the destruction at the nation’s capitol building to target his enemies, and empowered his own radical movement. Those enemies were largely Jews. That leader was Adolf Hitler. His manipulation of the Reichstag fire consolidated his power over the nation.
Immediately after the Capitol riot, some Democrats claimed it was “America’s Reichstag fire.” But they stopped saying that when they realized what that implied about them.
