I received a text yesterday from House majority leader Steve Scalise, not exactly personal to be sure, but one whose message resonated. “I am still fuming over the disgraceful Trump trial,” said Scalise. So, of course, am I and every other thinking person, including Donald Trump who rightfully described himself as a “political prisoner.”
By the time they come for Congress, there will be no one left to say anything at all.
If, however, Scalise has fumed over the disgraceful prosecution of the 1,424 (and still counting) protestors arrested for being in or near the Capitol on January 6, 2021, he has done it quietly. Scalise is hardly an exception. When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene pushed her colleagues to form a committee to investigate the treatment of the J6ers, she was met with indifference.
“We look into a lot of things that sometimes they may get to the next level of an investigation, and sometimes we just feel we don’t feel like we’ve got enough to go to an investigation,” said House Oversight chair James Comer in January 2023.
“A partisan judge oversaw a sham prosecution by a corrupt District Attorney for a bunch of made up crimes,” Scalise texted me in regard to the Trump trial. But I have to ask, where were Scalise and his colleagues when hundreds of ordinary citizens endured trials in D.C. as corrupt as the one Trump endured in New York? The GOP silence surely emboldened White House operatives and led them to believe that Republicans might just roll over on Trump as well.
I wrote my new book Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6 to put a human face on the greatest mass injustice against American citizens since Japanese internment. In the book, I profile ten women who went to Washington on that fateful day and explain why they went and how they, too, became political prisoners. (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: The Surprisingly Shallow, Stupid World of Salman Rushdie)
Although from a wide variety of backgrounds, these women shared a deeper commitment to freedom than the average citizen. They were also more aware of the corruption around them. To a person, they resisted the oppressive COVID regimes in their respective areas. Rather than submit to the airlines’ absurd restrictions, nine of the 10 drove to Washington from states as distant as Colorado and Idaho. The only one who flew was Ashli Babbitt and then because San Diego was a bit too far of a drive.
Unlike most Americans, these women knew all about the Russia collusion hoax that almost cost Trump the presidency in 2016 and did cost the Republicans the House in 2018. They knew how several states ignored the Constitution and loosened their voting laws without legislative approval. They saw how Biden operatives gathered up 51 intel officials to proclaim the Hunter Biden laptop a Russian hack and dump job. They watched in awe as the social media companies shut the laptop story down. And they stayed up past midnight on Election Day, only to see the counting stop and the vote count start shifting.
Knowing the Constitution, these women came to Washington “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” They had much to protest and had no intention of doing anything more than protest.
None was armed. And yet of the 10, two were killed by police action — Ashli Babbitt and Roseanne Boyland — and the surviving eight were arrested. Six of those eight have been imprisoned, and two others await sentencing, one a great grandmother.
Most, including Ashli Babbitt, entered through open doors or windows, wandered around sightseeing, shot some video, and stayed no more than 10 or 15 minutes. The worst offense any one of these women committed on January 6 was to help break a window.
The Sixth Amendment guaranteed the J6ers, as it did President Trump, the right “to an impartial jury.” In D.C., where these women were tried, only 5 percent of the citizens voted for the man the J6ers supported for president, Donald Trump. In Manhattan, where Trump was tried, the percentage wasn’t much higher.
I was able to attend the trial of Rebecca Lavrenz, a great grandmother from Colorado Springs. Lavrenz had walked in through an open Capitol door to pray and did just that, leaving 10 minutes after she arrived. Members of Congress had already evacuated the building by the time she entered.
Not believing she had committed any crime, Lavrenz refused to plead guilty. After three years in limbo, Rebecca went to trial in late March 2024. She was charged with the same four trumped-up misdemeanors as were many, perhaps most, of the 1400-plus protestors arrested on January 6: entering and remaining in a restricted building; disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct in a capitol building; parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol.
Eight of the 14 jurors, including two alternates, were white. Eight were female. As one of Rebecca’s hard-boiled attorneys told me, “The government strikes anyone who seems normal.” The common denominator among them seemed to be boredom. When the prosecutors elicited from a squat, female Capitol Police officer that she feared for her life, the jurors looked non-plussed. Living in a city whose media are geared to please the 95 percent of its audience that voted against Donald Trump, they had heard it all before.
The two young prosecutors — both thin, white, and bespectacled — evoked Hannah Arendt’s immortal phrase, “the banality of evil.” Arendt made that comment in reference to Nazi executioner-in-chief Adolph Eichmann. To be sure, the prosecutors had not ascended to that level of evil, but in their untroubled eagerness to send a prayerful great grandmother to prison they seemed capable. When badgered, Rebecca reiterated her firmly held belief, “It was my First Amendment Right to be seen and heard. I wanted my presence to be known.”
Toward the end of the fourth day of deliberation, the jurors delivered their verdict: guilty on all four counts. Rebecca received the news stoically. She thought the jurors might at least acquit her on the “disorderly and disruptive conduct” charge. That said, even before she left the courthouse that afternoon, Rebecca reasoned that the conviction was part of God’s plan. She did not have to wait long for confirmation.
Former President Trump took to Truth Social claiming that Rebecca had been “unfairly targeted by Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ” and now faced up to one year in prison for “praying for our Failing Nation on January 6th!” Trump understood that DOJ much more viscerally than did the Republicans in Congress. He understood that he and Lavrenz were victims of a judicial system hell bent on destroying the entire MAGA movement, legal niceties be damned. (READ MORE: Why Republicans Should Make January 6 Their Issue)
When the apparatchiks who manage that system came for the J6ers, Congress said nothing. When they came for President Trump, it almost didn’t matter what Congress said. By the time they come for Congress, there will be no one left to say anything at all.
Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is available for purchase.
