Tonight: one of the most important and sacrosanct rights is the right to protest peacefully. There have been few threats to this right over the last decade as serious and dangerous as many of the prosecutions of the non-violent January 6 defendants. From the start, prosecutors were faced with a genuine legal dilemma how could they convert January 6 from what it really was—a three-hour protest turned riot in which the vast majority of the people were non-violent—into not only a crime but major felonies for which lengthy prison terms could be imposed, even in the absence of allegations of the use of violence. The answer they came up with was to take long-standing laws and bestow upon them radical and exotic interpretations that those who wrote those laws could never have possibly envisioned. That is how the January 6 defendants the vast majority of whom are non-violent by the government’s own admissions, were turned into felons and given lengthy jail times. Finally, those radical prosecution theories which endangered the right to protest for all Americans, suffered a serious blow in the federal judiciary today, as a three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, composed of two Obama-appointed judges and one Clinton-appointed judges—so, all three Democratic-appointed judges—struck down one of the major theories used by the prosecution to impose lengthy prison terms. We report on this ruling and its significant implications for the January 6 defendants and also for Americans everywhere.
…And remember, no matter what you think of January 6, or what it was or how it was caused, no matter what you think about it, the fact is, the irrefutable fact, it’s just true numerically, is that the vast, vast majority of people who were accused of crimes in connection with January 6, the more than 1000 Americans who were charged with crimes, roughly 85%, or 90% of them are acknowledged to have been non-violent. They’re not accused of having used violence, which means they participated in a protest without using violence of any kind. The Biden Justice Department made very clear, as did the FBI, that they consider January 6 to be one of the worst, most dangerous, darkest days in our history, and that they would launch an unprecedented investigation. To do that, it was necessary to try to put the people who they prosecuted in jail, not as people guilty of a misdemeanor, but as people guilty of a felony, so they could put them in prison for a long time. And that is exactly what happened. There are a lot of January 6 defendants who have been convicted of felonies, even though they’re not accused of participating in an insurrection. And they’re not accused of using violence. They’re accused of a non-violent protest.
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