Lies related to the whereabouts of Vice President Kamala Harris and former Vice President Mike Pence on January 6 are coming to the fore.
Federal prosecutors last week scored a big victory after a Washington, D.C., jury took less than three hours to find Guy Reffitt, the first January 6 defendant to stand trial, guilty on all counts.
The Justice Department’s winning streak might be short-lived, however. Prosecutors will have a tougher task with the trial starting Monday for Couy Griffin, the “Cowboys for Trump” leader arrested for his minor and nonviolent involvement in the Capitol protest on January 6.
Griffin was the subject of my very first article over a year ago on the Justice Department’s abusive prosecution of January 6 protesters in which, coincidentally, I asked the rhetorical question, “Where is the outrage over America’s political prisoners?” as official Washington was in a tizzy over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imprisonment of his country’s star dissident.
After the government charged Griffin on January 19, 2021 with two low-level trespassing misdemeanors, acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin asked the court to keep Griffin detained pending trial. Sherwin, recall, bragged about a “shock and awe campaign” of January 6 arrests prior to Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Relying mostly on remarks Griffin made during and after the protest, Sherwin claimed that the New Mexico county commissioner, who never entered the Capitol, was a danger to the community. “[The] defendant is an inflammatory provocateur and fabulist who engages in racist invective and propounds baseless conspiracy theories, including that Communist China stole the 2020 Presidential Election,” Sherwin’s office wrote in a motion seeking Griffin’s imprisonment. “He denies the lawful election of the president and as [sic] stated repeatedly that Biden will never be president.”
Sherwin concluded Griffin is a racist because he publicly objected to playing the black national anthem at professional football games and suggested that the players “go back to Africa and form your little football teams over in Africa.”
A federal magistrate judge agreed. Calling the nation’s capital a “war zone” on January 6, Judge Zia Faruqui claimed Griffin’s comments were not protected under the First Amendment and signaled his defiance of the entire U.S. government. “[Griffin] won’t listen to those conditions [of release] because he may ultimately decide that those conditions are part of a flawed system that he must go by any means to overthrow and disrupt,” Faruqui said during a February 2, 2021 detention hearing. (The chief judge ordered Griffin’s conditional release a few days later.)
Faruqui also told Griffin’s defense lawyers during the hearing that “there is no doubt in my mind, in fact, in anyone’s mind, that there was a person protected by the Secret Service who was in that building, which is the Vice President of the United States of America.”
Those words might come back to bite the good judge.
The whereabouts of both Kamala Harris and Mike Pence are the basis for thousands of criminal charges related to January 6, including the two charges against Griffin. As Secret Service protectees, the Justice Department alleges under 18 U.S. Code, section 1752, their presence inside the Capitol during the four-hour disturbance rendered the building and surrounding grounds a “restricted” area closed to the public. Nearly every one of the nearly 800 Americans charged in the massive Capitol breach probe faces at least one 1752 count.
But the Justice Department recently was forced to admit that Harris was not in the building for most of the day on January 6. Harris, who was still a member of the U.S. Senate, had in fact left the Capitol in the late morning and inexplicably went to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, the same building where a pipe bomb allegedly was...
