The Biden administration may have just undermined the anti-Trump narrative created and pushed by the Democrats’ House special committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
The Justice Department said in a recent court filing that several Oath Keepers charged with unlawfully entering the Capitol during the mayhem cannot claim they were ordered to do so by former President Donald Trump, according to Breitbart News.
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As Breitbart noted, “DOJ lawyers argued Trump lacked the authority to authorize an attack on the Capitol, which should prevent Oath Keepers’ lawyers from blaming the former president.”
Quoting from court records, Breitbart added that federal prosecutors maintain Trump “did not have the authority to permit or authorize a conspiracy to forcibly oppose the authority of the government or the execution of the laws of the United States, nor could he have lawfully sanctioned the attack on the United States Capitol on Jan. 6 or any of the other criminal conduct allegedly perpetrated by defendants.”
Bloomberg News, which also reported on the filing, noted, “Many of the roughly 800 people charged in the riot have tried to argue they were just following Trump’s orders. The US argues the defendants knew better.”
Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes and several other members of the group have been charged with seditious conspiracy, among other offenses. Their trial begins in September.
Yet the Jan. 6 committee has tried to blame Trump as the impetus for the violence at the Capitol because he was the supposed mastermind of a vast effort to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election.
Early on, the Democrats and their left-leaning allies – GOP Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – suggested the violence that day was no accident.
“The attack on our Capitol was not a spontaneous riot,” Cheney said at a J6 Committee hearing in June. Cheney has said that Trump “summoned” the mob.
At another hearing in July, another committee member, Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Orlando, repeated this line.
“This was not a spontaneous call to action,” Murphy said, “but rather it was a deliberate strategy decided upon in advance by the president.”
Yet federal prosecutors, who are under pressure from the committee to charge Trump with something – anything – based on the panel’s show trial, now indicate that Trump had neither “authorized” nor “sanctioned” the chaos at the Capitol.
As it turns out, Cheney herself summed up what is now the government’s argument against the rioters, when she said of Trump during a hearing in July, “Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.”
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