Jamie Raskin: Jan. 6 Never Ended

Tuesday is a heavy day for the police officers who fought to put down the bloody insurrection at the Capitol five years ago. It is also a solemn day for the F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors who worked the largest criminal investigation in American history to bring the members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and all the other police-attacking rioters to justice.

Five years after Jan. 6, 2021, we are still caught up in a struggle between forces who are willing to use authoritarian violence outside the Constitution to take and wield power and those who stand up nonviolently for our Constitution in the streets and in the polling places. Neither side can claim victory yet.

It’s still very much Jan. 6 in America.

Thanks to the fastidious work of the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 Attack and the former special counsel Jack Smith, we have a broad understanding of President Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election. He claims to have won but actually lost by more than seven million votes and 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. We know about his defeat from court rulings destroying more than 60 outlandish federal and state court lawsuits alleging election fraud, the political shakedown he waged against election officials such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, the recruitment of counterfeit electors in swing states, Mr. Trump’s campaign to mobilize the Justice Department to his conspiracy and his efforts to coerce Vice President Mike Pence to unlawfully reject Joe Biden’s Electoral College votes so Mr. Trump could be anointed president.

These findings have not been meaningfully refuted in any way. Although certain behind-the-scenes maneuvers remain murky, in part because key witnesses like Mr. Trump have refused to testify, no amount of whitewashing can erase the images of “stop the steal” rioters assaulting police officers with baseball bats, metal pipes, Confederate and Trump flagpoles, bear spray and other chemicals. The rampaging mob drove members of Congress out of our chambers, conducted a search-and-destroy mission for the mahogany boxes containing Electoral College votes and prepared a gallows on the Capitol grounds for the vice president as they hunted him down, chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”

Mr. Trump and the election deniers tell a different story. For MAGA adherents, Jan. 6 is a kaleidoscopic projection of wild and contradictory conspiracy theories. Sometimes they frame it as 1776, a historic day of revolutionary resistance to the “deep state.” At other times, it’s a foreign-aligned corporate vote-rigging scheme against him — notwithstanding that Fox News was forced to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems over the channel’s airing of those fraudulent claims.
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Full guest opinion piece here:

https://archive.ph/j9ZxM




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