By Julie Kelly | American Greatness
Biden’s prosecutors may be fooling themselves—and federal
judges auditioning for a promotion—but they are not fooling the majority of
Americans.
No matter how much the Biden regime and news media want
Americans to forget what happened during the “social justice” protests of 2020,
the public remembers. A poll taken
last summer shows overwhelming support for investigations into the nationwide
looting and rioting following the death of George Floyd, which caused an
estimated $2 billion in damages and cost dozens of lives..
According to an analysis by a coalition of
police chiefs, at least “8,700 protests occurred across 68 major cities . . .
and 574 involved acts of violence,” in just a two-month span of 2020.
There is absolutely no comparison between the violence
that terrorized the country throughout 2020 and the four-hour disturbance at
the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021; any Democrat or Republican who equates the
two events should be tossed out of office. (Here’s looking at you,
Governor Chris Sununu.)
And while top law enforcement officials fixate on the so-called
“insurrection” they continue to downplay the murder and mayhem of 2020.
During a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing,
Jill Sanborn, assistant director of the FBI’s national security branch,
struggled to answer how many people face federal charges related to the 2020
riots. Sanborn admitted that the FBI has arrested “just north of 250 people” in
connection with the “violence that we all saw around the peaceful protests,” as
she described them.
Sanborn’s colleague, Assistant Attorney General Matthew
Olsen, had an easier time detailing the number of arrests in the department’s
sweeping Capitol breach probe. More than 700 January 6 protesters have been
arrested so far, Olsen told the committee, and 325 face felony charges. (The
total number of defendants now is more than 725 as the FBI arrests more January
6 protesters every week.)
Here’s what that means: Nearly three times as
many Americans have been arrested for federal crimes in connection with January
6 than the number arrested for perpetrating the far more violent, deadly, and
costly riots that lasted nearly four months, not four hours, in
2020.
Sanborn also wouldn’t tell Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) how
many 2020 rioters were subjected to military-style FBI raids or solitary
confinement conditions in prison awaiting trial, the fate of hundreds of
January 6 protesters. The answer, as Sanborn surely knows, is none.
What Sanborn and Olsen also don’t want to admit in public
is that the Justice Department is actively dropping cases
against 2020 rioters. Prosecutors continue to
dismiss charges against Portland rioters; in December, the U.S. attorney in
Portland asked a
court to dismiss an indictment against a trangender rioter accused of using a
high-powered laser against multiple police officers during Antifa’s 100-night
siege of that city.
Nearly all rioting charges against protesters who
occupied Lafayette Square in 2020—which prompted the lockdown of the nearby
White House and included attacks on law enforcement—have been dropped by
the same U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. now prosecuting January 6 trespassers.
Last July, prosecutors dismissed charges
against a Black Lives Matter protester indicted by a grand jury for attacking
federal officers in LaFayette Square in June 2020.
Now, the Justice Department is asking for leniency for
the few 2020 rioters actually facing federal charges.
Take, for example, the case of Montez Lee, Jr. On May 28,
2020, Lee, a Black Lives Matter protester, broke into Max It Pawn Shop in
Minneapolis, poured gasoline throughout the store, and set it on fire.
A few days later, the mother of Oscar Stewart contacted
law enforcement to report her son missing. Stewart’s abandoned car was parked
next to the pawn shop. It took authorities several weeks to identify the
charred remains of Stewart, another black man, found inside the shop. The
Hennepin County coroner ruled Stewart’s
death a homicide. (It’s unclear if Stewart was a fellow rioter or an employee.)
Justice Department prosecutors, however, did not agree
with that conclusion: Lee was charged with arson, not murder. And despite
a lengthy criminal record including assault and burglary, the government
offered Lee a deal to plead guilty to one count of arson, which he accepted in
July.
Based on sentencing guidelines, the Justice Department
calculated that the judge could sentence Lee to up to 240 months in prison. But
a federal prosecutor asked the court to slice nearly eight years off
his jail time. Why? Because Lee, unlike the government’s view of January 6
defendants, was engaged in a political protest those now in charge deem
commendable.
“Lee credibly states that he was in the streets to
protest unlawful police violence against black men, and there is no basis to
disbelieve this statement,” assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Calhoun-Lopez wrote
in November. “There appear to have been many people in those days looking
only to exploit the chaos and disorder in the interests of personal gain or
random violence. There appear also to have been many people who felt angry,
frustrated, and disenfranchised, and who were attempting, in many cases in an
unacceptably reckless and dangerous manner, to give voice to those feelings.
Mr. Lee appears to be squarely in this latter category.”
Calhoun-Lopez further argued against the judge
considering deterrence in Lee’s case since “the events of late May of 2020 were
informed by forces that have been present in this country since its inception.”
Therefore, the government concluded, Lee should be
sentenced to 144 months in prison rather than 240 months.
But even that sentence was too long for Judge Wilhelmina
M. Wright, a Minnesota district court judge appointed by Barack Obama in 2016.
Wright, now a leading candidate to
replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, instead sentenced Lee to
120 months in prison. “You are more than the person that destroyed that
business by fire,” Wright told Lee
in court on January 14. “You are more than the person who set that fire that
killed a man.”
Federal prosecutors and judges have no similar sympathies
for January 6 protesters. To the contrary, the Justice Department and D.C.
District Court judge consider Americans charged with low-level misdemeanors on
January 6, 2021 to be domestic terrorists.
For example, Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon shaman,
pleaded guilty to one count of obstruction last summer after spending 317 days
in solitary confinement. Chansley committed no violent crime on January 6—in
fact, he was allowed into the building and chatted with police—and is a veteran
with no criminal record.
But the very same Justice Department that wanted mercy
for Montez Lee asked a federal judge to sentence Chansley to 51 months in
prison.
Further, unlike in Lee’s case, prosecutors wanted the judge
to throw the book at Chansley as a deterrence measure. “The need to deter
others is especially strong in cases involving domestic terrorism, which the
breach of the Capitol certainly was,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kimberly Paschall
wrote the very same month her colleagues in Minnesota argued against deterrence
in Lee’s case. “The demands of general deterrence weigh strongly in favor of
incarceration, as they will for nearly every case arising out of the violent
riot at the Capitol.”
Got that, America? A four-hour chaotic disturbance,
likely instigated and/or encouraged by government agencies, is an act of
domestic terror but months of destruction, murder, looting, arson, and vicious
attacks on police, business owners, and innocent citizens is merely the “language
of the unheard,” as the Justice Department claimed in Lee’s case.
Biden’s prosecutors may be fooling themselves—and federal
judges auditioning for a promotion—but they are not fooling the majority of
Americans. What happened throughout 2020 was unequivocally an act of domestic
terrorism, a crime for which the Justice Department is wholly uninterested in
fairly prosecuting.
________________
About Julie Kelly
Julie Kelly is a political commentator and senior
contributor to American Greatness. She is the author of January
6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the
Political Right and Disloyal
Opposition: How the NeverTrump Right Tried―And Failed―To Take Down the
President. Her past work can be found at The Federalist and National
Review. She also has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The
Hill, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, and Genetic
Literacy Project.
