Capitol

January 29, 2021 was my ninth day as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Western District of Virginia. It was my dream job. After going through the rigorous application process, including an extensive background check, I was offered the role in November 2020 and took an oath to the Constitution of the United States on January 19, 2021. It was the proudest day of my life. I wore my grandfather’s pin commemorating his fifty years of service to the FBI on my first day and sent a picture to my parents of my swearing in. I was working from my house in Culpeper, since the office maintained a hybrid schedule post-Covid. I had a Zoom meeting set up for the afternoon with a member of the Office’s leadership. Little did I know I was about to get a knock on my door.

The Senate’s gay sex scandal started with a bang, but has ended with a whimper. This morning, the Capitol Police announced that they will not be pressing charges against Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the disgraced former Ben Cardin staffer filmed having sex with a male partner in the Hart Senate Office Building, as first reported by Cockburn. “For now, we are closing the investigation into the facts and circumstances surrounding a sex video that was recorded inside the Hart Senate Office Building on the morning of Wednesday, December 13,” the Capitol Police said in a statement. “Despite a likely violation of congressional policy — there is currently no evidence that a crime was committed.

Cockburn remembers well the Colbert Insurrection back in June, when several staffers on Stephen Colbert's Late Show were arrested for trespassing at the Capitol. Yet he's since been surprised to learn that the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has dropped all charges. Despite the clear and evident danger of the Colbert staffers, the Capitol Police released a statement saying: The United States Capitol Police was just informed the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia is declining to prosecute the case. We respect the decision that office has made. Any questions about that decision should be referred to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. If the Colbert crew got their cases dismissed, then what about the January 6ers?

It’s often said that memory is a fickle thing. Today, that fickleness has become a danger to the republic. If you turned on any of the major news networks over the past week, with the possible exception of Fox News, you’d have seen wall-to-wall coverage of the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol building. What’s concerning about this is all the misplaced lamentations. The travesty of the day was not the riot itself, though the assault was obviously horrific and a symbol of America’s democratic backsliding into an illiberal abyss. But the rampage was never an actual existential threat to the United States government and calling the attack an “insurrection” isn't accurate.

Congressman Adam Schiff is crowing. “It’s very positive,” he said on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press about the indictment of sometime Trump adviser Steve Bannon on two counts of contempt of Congress. He has a point. The indictment was never really about Bannon but about trying to create some shock and awe when it comes to eliciting testimony from other Trump janissaries such as his former chief of staff Mark Meadows. Bannon’s predicament, which he can try and spin to his personal advantage by portraying himself as a victim of the deep state, indicates that the January 6 commission is impeachment by other means.

There used to be an old joke that there were more members of the FBI who were members of the American Communist party than there were actual believers in rule from Moscow. Something like that seems to have occurred with the much ballyhooed 'Justice for J6' rally in Washington DC. Justice, schmustice. Much as I had expected, almost no one rallied to the rally. A grand total of two people were arrested. Seldom has Washington seemed more peaceful. The notion that DC was about to be stormed may have given a lascivious pleasure to those liberals convinced that the enemy is not just at the gates but within them already. But that was never in the cards. Having been caught napping on January 6, there was no way a repetition of those sanguinary events would recur.

Who shot Ashli Babbitt, the pro-Trump Air Force veteran who was killed by police during the January 6 riot at the US Capitol building? The American people were told that it was a Capitol Police officer who fired the fatal shot. But Cockburn has stumbled across some information that points to a different explanation. Sources close to and within the intelligence community tell Cockburn that Babbitt was actually shot by a member of then-vice president Mike Pence's protective detail. The VP's detail, of course, is provided by US Secret Service, not the Capitol Police. One person asserted to Cockburn over drinks in DC that this is 'basically an open secret' in the intelligence community.