Members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol have warned America for three years to take former President Donald Trump at his word.
Now, as Trump is poised to win the Republican presidential nomination, his criminal trials face delays that could stall them past Election Day, and his rhetoric grows increasingly authoritarian, some of those lawmakers find themselves following their own advice.
In mid-March, Trump said on social media that the committee members should be jailed. In December he vowed to be a dictator on “day one.” In August, he said he would “have no choice” but to lock up his political opponents.
“If he intends to eliminate our constitutional system and start arresting his political enemies, I guess I would be on that list,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose). “One thing I did learn on the committee is to pay attention and listen to what Trump says, because he means it.”
Lofgren added that she doesn’t yet have a plan in place to thwart potential retribution by Trump. But Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), who has long been a burr in Trump’s side, said he’s having “real-time conversations” with his staff about how to make sure he stays safe if Trump follows through on his threats.
“We’re taking this seriously, because we have to,” Schiff said. “We’ve seen this movie before … and how perilous it is to ignore what someone is saying when they say they want to be a dictator.”
There’s also motive and intent. A journalist trespassing to record is a very different thing from a protester trespassing to damage property and hurt people. I would need to see the court documents to know what precisely a given individual was charged with and the arguments for and against it to get a feel for why they were targeted. The goal in prosecuting events like this isn’t to catch everyone, but to catch enough people to prevent something similar from happening again.
The facts are:
There absolutely needs to be a legal response to that, but it’s impractical and probably undesirable to charge everyone involved, only the worst offenders. If you can show that some of those other individuals were worse offenders, that would make a compelling argument. However, just throwing out whataboutism isn’t going to convince me and just sounds like conspiracy nonsense to me.
Their “intent” is based off the joke that you quoted earlier which is the government using a joke. And you keep moving the goalposts all over the field here. If tresspassing is a crime, then its a crime, intent doesnt matter and ALL the journalists should be charged, but now you care about intent.
Great points a lot of people were injured and killed, and property was damaged, so people need to be prosecuted. If this is true since probably 100x more happened during the George Floyd riots, why do there seem to be less prosecutions?