FBI finds scant evidence U.S. Capitol attack was coordinated
reuters.com
reuters.com
Hilariously, the article describes the rally before the attack as “nearby,” as though it was a coincidence or something. When in fact the speakers at the rally enraged the audience and then told them to go to the Capitol.
I don't think anyone should be taking much of a victory lap on this unless the thing you were opposing was the idea that everyone came to the capitol that day to burn the place to the ground. I think it's been pretty clear for months that that wasn't the case.
People came to the capitol to listen to a political speech and express their outrage with the outcome of the election. And "about 5%" of them came to the capitol to try and start a riot...
Per the WaPo timeline, the protestors were already outside the Capitol at 12.40pm, whereas the speech didn't finish until 1.11pm. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2021/capit...
It's also a 35 minute walk from the Ellipse (where the speech was) to the Capitol. If you're in a crowd, that ostensibly would take longer as people move more slowly.
People were and are certainly angry, but besides the high standard of criminal conspiracy, people who were going to go to the Capitol were going to do so regardless of who or what was said at the rally.
Trump didn’t ask them to break laws, or trespass, or whatever else. You can look at the transcript of the rally if you want to seek the truth (https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-01-13/tra...). Here’s the relevant line:
> “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Thousands marched over the Capitol and protested outside, peacefully. A smaller number of less than 500 breached the barriers and continued the protest - this isn’t the first time a protest took place on Capitol grounds, but all the other such incidents seem to be from leftist activists and received little coverage. Only a much smaller number of people on January 6th took part in property damage or other crimes.
If Trump spoke to a crowd of nearly 10000 and only a very small number took part in rioting, how can it be claimed that he incited anything? How can it be claimed that he tried to take over the government? Biased journalists have casually used words like “incitement”, “coup”, and “insurrection” to great effect but January 6th involved none of those things. Even the few people who were part of a group didn’t bring weapons, and purposefully left them elsewhere. This article notes that almost everyone was there as a one-off individual acting on their own. Clearly no group had any designs on capturing the US government, because that would be an absurd undertaking.
> While the quote was not expressed as an order, it prompted four knights to travel from Normandy to Canterbury, where they killed Becket. The phrase is commonly used in modern-day contexts to express that a ruler's wish may be interpreted as a command by his or her subordinates.
"You will have an illegitimate president. That’s what you’ll have. And we can’t let that happen."
His speech explicitly demands the Vice President of the United States reject the election results.
He's laying out the national-level horrors that ensue if the VP does not. Stolen election, illegitimate President.
He's saying those horrors can't be allowed to happen.
We convict mob bosses for murder on less explicit statements than this.
Perhaps not. But if you [the politician, not the parent commenter] are socially aware at all, you ought to be aware that your words are going to be taken that way by some people. "But that's not what I said, and not what I meant!" Fine, but then you're clueless rather than criminal. That's still not president material.
Trump claimed "there was fraud" a bazillion times, with no evidence. He also told the Georgia Secretary of State to "find 12,000 votes", and a bunch of other stuff. That's the attempted coup.
How can there be visible evidence for a process that is very opaque, particularly because each state manages the process differently with their own standards on security and audits? There are some clear reasons to distrust the process: for example, the two major parties don't even agree on voter ID, which seems like such a basic requirement to have a trustworthy political process. Excuses against voter ID don't make sense given how much identification and validation is needed for the COVID-19 vaccinations, but they still persist.
Personally, I don't believe there was fraud at a scale that would affect the election outcomes. However, I do think there are a nonzero number of problems in every election season, many opportunities to improve the integrity of the process, and that we should strive for a perfectly trustworthy and easily auditable process. For now, identifying those opportunities to improve the process starts with speculating about what could have gone wrong.
> He also told the Georgia Secretary of State to "find 12,000 votes", and a bunch of other stuff. That's the attempted coup.
You're moving the goalposts. January 6th in particular, has been consistently been portrayed as a coup, by dedicated activists, journalists, and Biden supporters more broadly. Words have meaning, and clearly January 6th was not a "coup". As for the "find 12,000 votes" comment - I don't like it, and I'll wait for the conclusion of the investigations to see if any laws were broken. I will say though, that people also "find votes" in other ways - for example ballot harvesting is legal in Washington state, and politicians/activists regularly hold last minute drives to gather votes from homeless people (which can be marked to any desired location), in a process of dubious electoral security that is nevertheless legal.