75% of Americans Reject Claims of FBI Involvement in Attack on the Capitol

Saturday will mark the third anniversary of the insurrection at the US Capitol, part of a plot to stop the transfer of power from Republican Donald J Trump to Democrat Joe Biden.

More than 1230 of the participants from that riot have been arrested, and federal authorities are continuing to arrest people on an almost daily basis. Charges range from misdemeanor offenses like trespassing to felonies like assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy.

Sixty percent (730) of those charged have pleaded guilty to charges, while another estimated 170 have been convicted of at least one charge at a trial decided by a judge or a jury, according to the Associated Press. Just short of two thirds of those convicted have been sentenced to time behind bars. Two people were found innocent by a judge at trial.

Three years of propaganda and lies about that day by the ex-president and his MAGA cronies have warped the thinking of one quarter of the population into believing what they saw with their eyes was not what really happened.

Now we’re seeing media reporting on a Washington Post and University of Maryland poll attesting to the power of propaganda. Among respondents who identified Fox News as their primary news source, 39% believed the FBI was behind the insurrection; 44% of those who claimed to be Trump supporters shared that view.

The House Select committee hearings on the events of Jan 6 provided a larger context for what took place, including testimony about plans in advance of the election to make claims of voter fraud if the then-president didn’t win.

It doesn’t matter if Trump’s claims that the election was stolen from him have been repeatedly debunked by researchers hailing from across the political spectrum, he continues to repeat that falsehood in every public expression of his 2024 campaign for the presidency.

What has emerged is a preponderance of evidence saying there was another aspect (the “paperwork coup”) in planning to negate the will of the voters. Here’s David A Graham at the Atlantic (h/t Parker Malloy):

• The second prong was to persuade Pence to block or delay certification on January 6. Eastman wanted Pence to declare that there were no valid slates of electors from seven states that Trump allies claimed had major fraud. Ellis wrote in a memo that Pence should refuse to open votes from six states with putative controversies, though Sekulow rejected the theory. (She claims she was simply laying out legal theories, not endorsing them.) Waldron wanted Pence to accept alternative slates of electors from contested states, or else ignore the contested states altogether.

• It isn’t hard to spin scenarios about how this might have turned out, because the proponents did so right there in writing. Eastman imagined that Democrats would object, so Pence would say the matter had to go to the House of Representatives, where each state’s delegation would receive a vote. Because Republicans controlled a majority of state delegations, they would elect Trump. Ellis foresaw a different possibility: Pence would demand that states make a response, effectively kicking the question back to state legislatures. Waldron, who was more of an outsider but did manage to meet with Meadows and members of Congress in the days before January 6, had the most chilling suggestion: that Trump declare a national-security emergency, effectively bypassing democracy in the name of a manufactured crisis.

Now the former president is amping up claims that evidence gathered by congress in its investigation has been destroyed to prevent him from proving his innocence in various upcoming criminal trials. 

Here’s Liz Dye at Public Notice with the truth:

• Clearly, the January 6 Select Committee didn’t “destroy” all the evidence it collected. The Committee’s final report runs to 845 pages, and tens of thousands of pages of witness transcripts and committee notes are available online. But those transcripts do not include interviews with Secret Service agents, and if there is a kernel of truth to Trump’s ranting, it’s here. 

• Committee Chair Bennie Thompson and Vice Chair Liz Cheney do indeed appear to have deliberately removed the Secret Service interviews from congressional control before the Committee was dissolved. But they had a good reason to do so.

• On December 30, 2022, they sent letters to White House lawyer Richard Sauber and Department of Homeland Security General Counsel Jonathan Meyer entrusting those transcripts to the executive branch. Thompson and Cheney conceded that Secret Service agents had spoken to the Committee only on the explicit understanding that their interviews would be kept confidential to protect “Secret Service operational details or private information regarding any agent

Given the MAGA cult’s propensity for threatening those who say things displeasing to Trump, this withholding of data looks to have been a sensible decision.

At the turn of the century, most on the right  –excluding the Timothy McVeigh fan club– supported the FBI in its investigations. When those investigations began challenging MAGA-style propaganda (and Barack Obama was elected), suddenly the agency’s history of meddling in domestic politics was revived… but without mention that the decades of dirty tricks and infiltration were aimed primarily at civil rights and anti-war targets.

The FBI did, in fact, target some of the militia type groups on the right. But when the GOP shifted to incorporate and/or tolerate those extremist views, suddenly it was a bad thing, connected to the ‘deep state.’

So the MAGA mind-hive looked to explain the events of January 6, 2021, two concocted entities were blamed: Antifa along with the FBI. No evidence has emerged in any credible investigation  –which doesn’t include random bros on the internet– of either group playing a role in the insurrection.

The problem Americans have with this type of conspiratorial gunk is that the mainstream media mostly reports on them as if there was some credibility involved. 

Below you see an example of this sort of nonsense by the Associated Press:

There are many ways this story could have been parsed, but the AP opted for the “both sides” approach. Fine.

I guess calling out one candidate for defending democracy and the other for wanting to destroy it would have been impossible in the world these journalists live in.

Here’s the headline given to the story about results of the Washington Post/University of Maryland polling in today’s Union-Tribune (and other outlets):

Poll: Quarter of Americans believe FBI instigated Jan. 6

Finally, there’s this analysis by Ian Reifowitz at Daily Kos:

• Any individual poll is of limited value, as social scientists can tell you. But some of the most valuable pieces of information polling can reveal are changes over time. When the same pollster asks the same questions at two different points in time, using the same methodology, that’s an apples-to-apples comparison of what people believe, and can reveal a great deal. That’s what we have in this case.

• The polls described above demonstrate, with verifiable data, that right-wing lies have moved Republican voters. The fact that the shift is smaller to nonexistent among other voters, including independents, suggests strongly that those who consume right-wing media and listen to right-wing demagogues from Trump on down are much more likely to believe the lies about the insurrection than those Americans who do not. Three years of hearing nothing that resembles the truth about Jan. 6 has taken its toll on our public discourse. And that’s exactly what the Tangerine Palpatine wanted.

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Friday’s Links to ponder

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A chemical disaster occurred almost every day in 2023 via Emily Atkin at Heated

• Last year, in commercials and Congressional hearings alike, the fossil fuel industry and its political allies upped their messaging around the chemical byproducts of oil and gas, calling petrochemicals “essential to life,” and warning it would be dangerous to phase them out or transition to greener alternatives.

• What proponents consistently did not mention, however, was that petrochemicals were leaking, exploding, and catching fire all over the country last year, causing disastrous consequences multiple times per week.

• There were at least 322 hazardous chemical incidents in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Chemical Incident Tracker, a database of media-reported accidental chemical releases compiled by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters. That’s around a 70 percent increase in media-reported chemical incidents since 2022, when the coalition recorded only 189 disasters.

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Florida abortion rights initiative reaches ballot threshold via Axios

• A coalition of Florida abortion rights supporters surpassed the required number of signatures needed to put a referendum on next year's ballot, according to the latest data from the state Division of Elections.

• Why it matters: If advocates succeed in enshrining abortion rights in Florida's constitution through the ballot measure, it would have massive implications for reproductive health care across the South.

• Details: The proposed amendment reads, "No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient's health, as determined by the patient's healthcare provider."

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The real reason Mike Johnson chaperoned 60 House Republicans at the border  Via Paul Waldman at MSNBC (Remind yourself of this next time Supervisor Jim Desmond opens his yap)

• Given this toxic stew of silliness and bad faith with which Republicans approach a complicated policy issue that they claim to care about above all others, you’d think the White House and congressional Democrats would be roasting them mercilessly. They’d be telling the public that only one party is serious about immigration, and it isn’t the one that shouts the loudest about it. 

• If only that were true. Instead, the White House and Democrats seem helpless as Republicans insist on blocking President Joe Biden’s request for more Ukraine funding — or even funding for the government as a whole — unless it is joined to radical immigration policy changes that they know Democrats won’t tolerate. The result may be no more help for Ukraine, and it certainly won’t be anything to address the problems at the border. Which is just fine with Republicans. 

• Consider the incentives at work for your average Republican lawmaker (a term I use loosely). Since most of them come from districts of a deep shade of crimson, their only electoral worry comes from a far-right primary challenge. Ranting about the dangers of migrants is therefore vital — showing how mad they are and blaming Biden for the recent increase in border crossings. They’ll never be punished for not solving a problem, particularly if the solution involves compromise, which among Republicans is tantamount to treason. “Let me tell you, I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating,” Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, recently told CNN. “I will not help the Democrats try to improve this man’s dismal approval ratings.”