I have watched far too many videos of the killing that took place last week in Minneapolis, when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot an unarmed woman in the head as she tried to drive away from him. Nothing I have seen comports with what Trump administration officials said in the aftermath. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem trashed the dead woman as a domestic terrorist. Vice President JD Vance called her “a deranged leftist.” President Donald Trump said she “violently, willfully and viciously” ran over the ICE officer.
Likewise, I have watched far too many videos of the violence and bloodshed that were unleashed on the Capitol five years ago by a pro-Trump mob determined to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Nothing that I have seen comports with what was posted on the White House website last Tuesday to mark the terrible event’s fifth anniversary: “The Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as ‘insurrectionists’ and framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump.”
The extent to which the Trump administration is trying to pretend away what one former federal prosecutor called “the most documented crime in American history” is shameful.
Orwellian efforts to memory hole Jan. 6 include the Department of Justice deleting the public database that tracked criminal cases resulting from the day’s violence. References to the day as a “riot” or “insurrection” have disappeared from government websites, replaced with descriptions of “peaceful protests.” The FBI deleted its “wanted” posters for unsolved Jan. 6 cases. And of course, there are the blanket pardons of more than 1,500 rioters, many of whom viciously assaulted police officers.
I think you can draw a line between last Wednesday’s killing in Minneapolis and the Jan. 6 riot: People who do Trump’s bidding know they have nothing to fear from the justice system, and may even be rewarded for their behavior.
The ICE officer who killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, poet and mother of three, strolled away from her car as her bloody body was slumped over the wheel, got into an SUV and drove away. He is already being portrayed as a victim by Trump and his supporters. I expect we will eventually see a presidential medal of some sort for him.
Pardoned J6 criminals who consider themselves victims want to sue the government for damages, undoubtedly inspired by the $5-million payout to the family of J6 rioter Ashli Babbitt, who was slain as she tried to storm a barricaded door and enter the House Speaker’s Lobby at the Capitol.
Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio has already filed a $100-million lawsuit against the government, alleging wrongful imprisonment, among other things. Until his pardon, he was serving a 22-year prison term for seditious conspiracy. Last Tuesday, Tarrio was in D.C., leading a march to commemorate Babbitt and other protesters hurt in the clashes — but not the police officers whose later deaths were attributed to the riot, nor the approximately 150 officers who were injured in the hourslong melee and who still suffer to this day.
At this sickening moment in our history, I was heartened, and even a little bit shocked, as I watched a hearing convened last Tuesday by House Democrats to commemorate the anniversary. Witnesses included representatives, police officers, prosecutors and at least one person who took part in the violence and now deeply regrets it.
Pamela Hemphill, 73, was dubbed the “MAGA Granny” for her role in the Jan. 6 attacks. She livestreamed the attack on Facebook, and in 2022, pleaded guilty to demonstrating, picketing or parading in a Capitol building. She was sentenced to 60 days in prison and 36 months of probation, and ordered to pay $500 in restitution. When she was offered Trump’s pardon, she refused it.
“What I did was wrong,” Hemphill told the House panel. “I pleaded guilty to my crime because I did the crime. I received due process and the DOJ was not weaponized against me. Accepting that pardon would be lying about what happened on January the 6th. I am guilty and I own that guilt.”
Imagine that.
Republican leaders, so many of whom blamed Trump for inciting the riot before bending the knee once again, wanted no part of Jan. 6 commemorations. Instead, House GOP members gathered at a Kennedy Center retreat, where Trump shamelessly blamed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the violence. (“God forbid if they ever put this president under oath,” Pelosi told House Democrats last Tuesday. “His people know never to do that.”)
House Speaker Mike Johnson is so afraid of Trump he has refused to hang the plaque Congress approved in 2022 to honor the officers who saved them from the J6 mob. It was supposed to be hung at the west front of the Capitol, where some of the most intense fighting took place. “Their heroism will never be forgotten,” it says. Sure, sure.
(On Thursday, the Senate voted unanimously to hang it in a temporary location until, presumably, Johnson can locate his spine.)
I suggest that those who insist on recalling Jan. 6 as a day of peaceful protest be required to peruse NPR’s new visual archive devoted to the events. Even five years later, the violence still shocks.
As our president and his apparatchiks try to rewrite history, or lie about an ICE shooting, the rest of us have a moral obligation to speak the truth and call them out. Believe your eyes, not their lies.
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