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Lying face down and surrounded, D.C. Metro police officer B.M — as identified in court records — was very likely aware he might die. Moments earlier he had been seized by January 6th rioters and thrown onto the sharp Capitol Building steps. A violent mob now loomed over him with makeshift weapons. No one could miss the large white word “police” emblazoned on his back, or the fact he was helpless, yet they still proceeded to beat him mercilessly before dragging him deeper into the crowd and further from help.
“Every single one of those Capitol law enforcement officers, death is the remedy. That’s the only remedy they get,” said Arkansas truck driver Peter Stager, who was filmed repeatedly striking Officer B.M.
Justice Department lawyers at that time wrote that “Stager joined in a prolonged, multi-assailant attack on police officers, which resulted in injuries to the officers. Stager himself wielded a flagpole and used it to strike at a vulnerable officer who, lying face down in a mob of rioters, had no means of defending himself.”
Another rioter was photographed standing at the officer’s head. A third appeared to be holding the officer down as they struck him with a baton or pipe. A fourth, former body builder and model Logan Barnhart of Michigan, “dragged him in a prone position from the police line, out of the Archway, and down a set of stairs into the violent mob, where the officer was further attacked with weapons,” court documents report.
On the ground nearby was a white and red flag bearing the name “Trump.”
One officer was killed in the Capitol riot and another four ended their own lives following the trauma of the event. More than 100 officers were injured. Many were left with deep physical and emotional scars, some that have still not healed.
However, this month, the same Department of Justice that prosecuted more than 1,000 violent Jan. 6 rioters has quietly started scrubbing these prosecutions from their website. In place of press releases detailing the defendants’ brutal attack on our government, Washington is offering the same attackers a lucrative payout for daring to prosecute them in the first place.
The president’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” of $1.776 billion — itself a mocking number — is open for business, but only for “patriots” investigated for breaking the law between Trump’s two terms.
Not only has he already pardoned them all, circumventing the work of countless law officers and jury members, but now the president has declined to rule out payments to those rioters who seized the Capitol building with police officers’ blood on their hands.
Payments would be decided by a five-person commission, all but one of whom are appointed directly by the Attorney General, and payments would not be subject to any oversight such as judicial review. Any member of the commission can be directly fired by the president without cause, putting them squarely under his command. In short, the president firmly holds both the purse strings and the puppet strings.
Today’s Justice Department has increasingly become a Big Brother mouthpiece that demands Americans forget it rightfully investigated and legally convicted presidential allies of breaking the law. It is unparalleled proof of the flagrant grift growing rampant in the White House that undermines the fabric of our democracy.
“We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration,” the DOJ announced when journalists uncovered their erasure. “We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”
The irony of the president’s actions is as staggering as it is callous. Stager’s fellow truck drivers, those who didn’t attack the police, are struggling under the growing economic disaster of Trump’s own making. Diesel fuel has increased by more than 40% over the course of the war in Iran, reported CNN, which has eroded operators’ already slim profit margins.
As driver Rock Davis told NBC’s KNDU Local News in March, “We were barely keeping up before this started. … Another month like this, there’s gonna be some severe shortages at every store just because of the fact that people can’t run [freight loads]. America will grind to a halt.”
Where is their bailout? Surely the industry that keeps America moving deserves the president’s support more so than his political cronies who time and again have been caught trying to circumvent the law. Coloring their rightful prosecution as “partisan” does not erase the fact that hard-working Americans and their police officers deserve equal if not greater consideration by the nation’s highest office.
Video evidence of Stager striking the body of a fallen police officer with the American flag is not partisan propaganda. The self-made posts by Jan. 6 rioters bragging about their crimes on social media is not partisan propaganda. Their recorded death threats, their bloody images, the wounds they caused, and their subsequent courtroom convictions are not partisan propaganda. They are proof the justice system once worked.
This slush fund is the president’s latest attempt to twist the judicial system into a farce of itself that benefits his allies and makes a mockery of his office. There is nothing partisan about holding rioters responsible for the blood they shed on the Capitol steps. The truck drivers who went to work on Jan. 6 instead of going to a bloody riot stand to gain nothing for following the law.
The fact that someone who was convicted of one such beating stands to gain financially for this act of violence tells us exactly who the president is interested in protecting.
And it isn’t the struggling American workers who follow the law.
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