The goal of J6 revisionism is to convince Americans not to believe what they saw: an insurrectionist riot mounted by Trump supporters whom he incited with his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. One critical move for the J6 deniers is to delegitimize the FBI and the Justice Department for their pursuit of the rioters. That’s why Loudermilk’s first shot was this hearing that was supposed to focus on the case of the pipe bomber who planted explosive devices at the respective headquarters of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party prior to the January 6 assault. The bureau’s years-long failure to catch the perp has been a black mark for the FBI and a source of much conspiracy-mongering on the right.
Last month, the FBI, after reviewing evidence it had previously collected, finally arrested a suspect: Brian Cole Jr., a 30-year-old Trump supporter who believed Trump’s lies about the 2020 vote tally. Case settled? Not for the J6 deniers. There are legitimate questions about how the FBI handled this investigation and why it took so long to nab a suspect. But Loudermilk’s hearing did not stick to that worthy subject and instead became a forum for bat-crap crazy.
As witnesses, the Republicans served up former national security professionals who presented an assortment of alternative-reality accounts. Thomas Speciale II, who says he was a former senior intelligence collection strategist at the National Counterterrorism Center, claimed the FBI, during the Biden years, never “truly” pursued the pipe bomber because it was “singularly focused after January 6 to prevent Donald J. Trump from becoming president and to cripple, intimidate, and silence his allies and supporters.” The FBI, he charged, was too fixated “on covering up lies, criminal misconduct, and election interference” and too busy “hunting Trump supporters”—meaning the J6 thugs. That is, the FBI was working to protect the evildoers who rigged the election against Trump and essentially let the pipe bomber go.
Over the years, MAGA conspiracists have conjured various tales about the pipe bomber: He was an anti-Trump activist, and the FBI was covering that up. He was part of an inside job mounted by the FBI, and the FBI was covering that up. She was a Capitol Hill police office, and the FBI was covering that up. With the apprehended suspect a Trumper, it’s been hard for these folks to fit that into a MAGA-friendly narrative—which may be why some MAGA stalwarts are now insisting that Cole is not the real bomber. But that’s another story.
At the hearing, John Nantz, a former FBI agent and a right-wing commentator, accused the FBI of failing to catch the pipe bomber for years because it was “myopically focused” on “violent white extremists” and squandered its resources on “persecuting Trump supporters.” He tossed out much of the usual MAGA fare about a politicized FBI and claimed the bureau had started the Trump Russia investigation due to “a thin tissue of preposterous fictions spun by operatives of the Clinton campaign.” (That was false. The FBI launched the investigation on its own initiative, not because of any supposed Clinton chicanery.)
But Nantz really dived into the deep end when he described the January 6 riot. He insisted the demonstration at the Capitol was “peaceful and civilized” until “radical elements wearing the uniform of antifa anarchists began a campaign of agitation and vandalism which drew a minority of the more gullible into criminal acts.” Huh? There’s no uniform for antifa.
Nantz went on to say that the “objective” of J6 was obvious: “To stigmatize Republican protesters and bludgeon President Trump and his supporters with bigoted labels, such as white supremacist, white nationalist extremists.” So antifa, in unforms, managed to provoke hundreds of Trump supporters into beating the hell out of the cops, breaking into the Capitol, and trying to stop the certification of the electoral vote count so Trump supporters could be denigrated as racists? This is (sadly) laughable.
Speciale blamed the Capitol Hill cops. He noted that many in the crowd were military veterans and former law enforcement officers. “Veterans are trained to do one thing and one thing only—that is, fight tyranny and fight injustice,” he testified. “So when the Capitol police began CS-gassing the crowd, the veterans and the law enforcement stepped forward to protect the crowd.” You see? Rioters were only trying to protect other rioters from the bad cops. Of course, this doesn’t explain why these fighters-against-injustice then broke into the Capitol, shouted “Hang Mike Pence,” and searched for members of Congress so they could thwart the certification. (I’d like to see him apply this, uh, logic to BLM and anti-ICE protests.)
The hearing, though, showed that the problem wasn’t with the witnesses. It’s with the Republican legislators. They were nuttier than the conspiracists at the witness table.
Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) angrily denounced the original J6 House committee, calling it a “sham” that “set out to destroy Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.” He pointed out that its final report mentioned the Proud Boys 218 times but only referred to antifa on 20 instances. (The Proud Boys smashed into the Capitol. Antifa activists did not.) He then loudly repeated a preposterous conspiracy theory about Ray Epps, an Arizona man who was in the crowd at the Capitol who MAGA loons claim was a secret government agent who engineered the whole thing. This dumb notion was soundly debunked years ago. But Nehls is still championing it. He played a video about Epps that declared, “This was an operation.” More baseless Deep State hokum.
Nehls was outdone by Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.). He performed something of a dramatic reading that accused the FBI of orchestrating the riot. And it all began with Covid:
The government oppression America suffered in the Covid era leading up to the November election cycle of 2020 was unprecedented. The Biden FBI did penetrate legitimate First Amendment communications in groups of American patriots who had the audacity to object to government oppression. The Biden FBI, trained to manipulate and agitate, did foment rage within these groups of American patriots. The November 2020 election cycle was compromised. The Biden FBI did have undercover agents and confidential informants embedded within the rally crowd on J4, J5 and J6. The Biden FBI did conspire to entrap MAGA Americans prior to J6 and then successfully entrapped several hundred Americans on J6. The Biden FBI and the DOJ did unrighteously persecute, arrest and imprison entrapped Americans.
Can you spot the little problem with Higgins’ soliloquy? He asserts the Biden FBI concocted the January 6 riot so it could “entrap” and arrest hundreds of Trump supporters. There was no Biden FBI until January 21, 2021—that is, after J6. The government oppression and purported FBI wrongdoing he assails happened with the Trump FBI. What buffoonery. If you’re going to give us a conspiracy theory, please, please check your dates and make sure they line up with your loony idea. It’s the least you can do.
Higgins asked Nantz why the FBI had failed for years to crack the pipe bomber case. Nantz replied it was due to poor leadership at the bureau. But Higgins had his own theory about that, too: “How could the FBI be that inept? I believe it was purposeful. I believe they identified the suspects in the 200 [cellphone numbers the bureau had collected of possible suspects] and none of them fit the profile of the so-called white supremacist MAGA activist. So they stepped away from that investigation.” The bureau dropped the investigation because it could not pin it on a white nationalist. That’s some fantasy—especially given that the fellow recently arrested is a Trumper. (He’s likely not a white nationalist, though; he’s Black.)
Higgins also dismissed the previous testimony of police officers who described how they were brutalized, beaten, and bloodied by the January 6 mob as “highly scripted” accounts from “Trump haters.” A true law-and-order, back-the-blue stance. In the front row of the audience sat Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, wearing a black cowboy hat, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the riot. Also in the house was a bevy of J6 attackers.
Other Republicans on the panel suggested the FBI pipe bomber case involved a nefarious plot. Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) said he believed something foul had been afoot with the FBI probe. And Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) even hinted that Cole was not the real suspect, suggesting that the FBI—run by Kash Patel and (until recently) Dan Bongino—was up to no good. Loudermilk poked at the FBI, saying “resources were shifted over” from the pipe bomber case to the prosecution of the January 6 rioters.
The one witness called by the Democrats on the committee was Michael Romano, who was deputy chief of the Justice Department section that prosecuted the January 6 rioters. He tried to inject some sanity into the proceedings. He told the legislators:
The rioters understood their conduct in political terms. I saw this repeatedly in the evidence we gathered. I saw rioters circulate in advance, via Facebook, a picture of the US Capitol with text superimposed over it: “Occupy Congress. If they won’t hear us, they will fear us. The great betrayal is over. Election Fraud is Treason. January 6, 2021.” Rioters sending these messages planned to storm the Capitol; their conduct wasn’t spontaneous. One rioter I prosecuted, Cody Mattice, recorded himself as he marched to Capitol Hill, saying, “We’re going to go fuck some shit up. It’s about to be nuts.” On reaching the Capitol, he said (of the building), “We’re getting up front, and we’re taking this shit.” He was not peacefully marching to the Capitol.
Mattice recorded his co-defendant, James Mault, asking officers to stand down because “We had your guys’ back when you were under attack,” and promising that “your jobs will be here…after we kick the shit out of” Members of Congress. He was not instigated by the police. The evidence showed me that the mob shared their sentiments. The mob had a purpose: to prevent the certification of the electoral college vote through violence, or threats of violence. After smashing their way into the building, rioters demanded of Officer Goodman: “Where are they counting the fucking votes?”
Romano denounced Trump’s pardon of the rioters. His testimony contained a powerful warning;
The pardons were permission for political violence, in the future, in support of this president and his administration. And from what I have seen, the rioters understand the pardons in these terms. Indeed, last week—on the five-year anniversary of January 6—I saw that formerly convicted felons traveled to Washington, DC, and recorded themselves taunting the same police officers they attacked five years ago. They know that if they do violence again, in support of the president, the president will have their back. They know because he did have, and has had, their back.
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