The Patriot Post® · Revisiting the Capitol Mayhem

If you believe, as we do, that Impeachment 2.0 was a farce, you’re about to become even more convinced.

How so? Evidence continues to mount that the January 6 riot at the Capitol was planned well in advance of President Donald Trump’s speech just beforehand. And if it was planned well in advance, the Democrats’ impeachment claim that the president incited the violence by whipping up a frenzied mob with his speech that very day begins to fall apart.

The relevant portion of the Democrats’ article of impeachment, “Incitement of Insurrection,” reads as follows:

Shortly before the Joint Session commenced, President Trump, addressed a crowd at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. There, he reiterated false claims that “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.” He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — lawless action at the Capitol, such as: “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive and seditious acts.

But as Ian Schwartz reports at RealClearPolitics, “Investigative journalist John Solomon [of Just the News] said the D.C. Metropolitan police has denied his news company’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to see the department’s investigation into the Capitol Hill riot. In an interview with ‘Real America’s Voice’ host Eric Greitens on Wednesday, Solomon said police are keeping interviews with key capitol security officials secret because there is something ‘embarrassing.’ … Solomon said he has ‘significant evidence’ that the Capitol Police, FBI, and Congress had prior warning of a planned attack and it was not a spontaneous riot emanating from President Donald Trump’s speech that day.”

Can a president be unimpeached? Inquiring minds want to know.

There’s plenty that we still don’t know about last Wednesday, and some of the key players seem pretty tight-lipped about it. “The question I have,” says Solomon, “is what did Nancy Pelosi, what did Mitch McConnell know about these threats beforehand? If they didn’t know, it’s an intelligence failure of the police. If they did know, there’s something they didn’t tell us before we went into this impeachment round today.”

As Solomon noted Wednesday in an interview on “Actionable Intelligence with Eric Greitens,” it was “a drive-by impeachment.”

While thousands of people approached the Capitol and milled around outside, those who led the charge to breach the building don’t appear to have been garden-variety Trump supporters. One of them, in fact, was a Black Lives Matter agitator named John Sullivan. He was arrested in Utah yesterday. As the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy reports, “A self-styled Black Lives Matter activist who filmed himself encouraging the storming of the Capitol last week and was nearby when a police officer shot and killed a woman trying to climb through a window outside of the House speaker’s lobby was charged in federal court Thursday. John Sullivan, the founder of Insurgence USA and a leftist protest organizer, was charged in an 18-page criminal complaint. … The complaint notes Sullivan wore a ballistics vest and gas mask when he entered the Capitol through a broken window and pushed past U.S. Capitol Police once inside.”

There was even a video — since removed by YouTube whitewashers — of Sullivan bragging about having posed as a Trump supporter and breaking windows at the Capitol.

One more question about Sullivan: He’s reported to have been near Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed woman who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police lieutenant while climbing onto a window outside the House Speaker’s Lobby. Did Sullivan encourage or provoke her?

Others, as the Associated Press reports, came from the far Right: “Among the most prominent to emerge is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and decorated combat veteran from Texas who was arrested after he was photographed wearing a helmet and body armor on the floor of the Senate, holding a pair of zip-tie handcuffs.”

Suffice it to say: More than 74 million Americans voted for Donald Trump on November 3, and tens of thousands of them came to Washington on January 6 to peacefully protest what they sincerely believe to have been a stolen election. A relative handful of extremists — those who led or otherwise encouraged the violence at the Capitol — and a Trump-hating mainstream media have unfairly tarred them.

Finally, we’d argue that one lefty agitator charged so far by police doesn’t discount our story last week: “No, It Wasn’t Antifa.” The understandable reaction from many grassroots Trump supporters, including some who were there and told us about the rally, was to blame the Left for a “false flag” operation of sorts. More than a week out and as police investigations continue, that just doesn’t appear to be the case.