Democratic Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin used a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on censorship Tuesday as a platform to launch into a tirade about the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
The hearing focused on the “censorship industrial complex” and featured witness testimony from Mollie Hemingway, Jonathan Turley, Benjamin Weingarten, Mary Anne Franks and Gabe Rottman. Durbin began his opening statement by accusing President Donald Trump and his allies of attacking the First Amendment, then ranting for three minutes about his fear that the history of the riot is being rewritten, including by at least one of the witnesses.
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“After the end of World War II, someone asked Winston Churchill, ‘How do you think history is going to treat you?’ He said, ‘It’s going to be just fine. I know that because I’m going to write the history.’ We saw that happen then and we saw the Soviet Union go through revision of history regularly,” Durbin said. “If there was some event that they perhaps didn’t want to have reported and that’s factual. I fear that’s what’s going on today when it comes to the January 6 riot here in the United States Capitol, particularly by one or two of the witnesses at the table.”
“You are meeting here today safe, peaceful because men and women in uniform are risking their lives of this very moment for you and for me,” he continued. “What happened on January 6 to 140 of these men and women in uniform protecting this Capitol? They were beaten unmercifully by a mob. Several of them died afterwards. That’s a fact. And the facts should also be realistic too.”
Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick died on Jan. 7 after he engaged rioters who entered the building, but the chief medical examiner of Washington, D.C. found that he suffered two strokes and died of natural causes. Capitol Police officers Jeffrey Smith and Howard Liebengood committed suicide several days after the riot.
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“Anyone who wants to characterize that event of January 6 as ‘the riot used to launch the war on wrongthink’ — what in the hell is wrongthink?” Durbin asked.
Durbin was referencing Weingarten’s article in The Federalist titled, “Trump’s J6 Pardons Signal The End Of The War On Wrongthink.” Trump on Jan. 20 signed an executive order granting full pardons to an estimated 1,500 Jan. 6 protesters.
“The same person who used the word ‘wrongthink’ went on to say, ‘Law enforcement resources were better allocated toward not treating grandmas wandering the Capitol grounds like jihadists,” Durbin said, quoting the article.
The senator went on to detail the most egregious examples of Jan. 6 protesters, sarcastically calling them “grandmas.”
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“So we’re going to rewrite history now? This is grandma’s on a tour of the Capitol on January 6? Like hell it was. I was there. And some of us were there as well,” he said. “The men and women who risked their lives for me, and I owe a debt of gratitude I can’t even express at this point. That is rewriting history. That is a corruption of speech. We shouldn’t allow it to occur.”
Nearly 1,600 defendants were federally charged in connection with the riot, according to the Department of Justice. Over 600 defendants faced charges of assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement officers, or obstructing those officers during a civil disorder. An additional 174 defendants faced charges of using a deadly or dangerous weapon or inflicting serious bodily injury to an officer.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
