House Republicans continue GOP’s affront to law enforcement

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and other lawmakers emerged Friday from a visit to Jan. 6 defendants incarcerated in the D.C. jail and proclaimed them to be victims of an alleged “two-tier injustice system.” Greene said, “We have to return freedom and due-process rights to these pre-trial Jan. 6 defendants.” But these inmates are not victims. And the congressional delegation’s embrace of them is an insult to the approximately 140 police officers who were assaulted during the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

We know that because we obtained, and for the first time published, the D.C. Department of Correction’s official list of the 20 Jan. 6 inmates held as of March 13, 2023. Here is what Greene and other top Republicans don’t want you to know:

None of the 20 inmates are “political prisoners.” All of them have been charged with committing serious offenses on Jan. 6, 2021. Greene referred to them as “pre-trial” defendants — but nine of the 20 have already been convicted of, or pleaded guilty to, at least some of the charges against them.

Seventeen of the 20 have been charged with assaulting law enforcement officers during the attack on the U.S. Capitol; Eight of the 17 have been either convicted at trial (two) or pleaded guilty (six) to assaulting officers.

The remaining three Jan. 6 inmates who have not been charged with assaulting law enforcement officers have been charged with other serious crimes. One of them, William Chrestman, is a member of the Proud Boys, charged — among other things — with threatening a federal officer. Another, Jessica Watkins, is a member of the Oath Keepers who has already been convicted of several charges, including conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding.

It’s no secret what drove these people to storm the U.S. Capitol. They were motivated, first and foremost, by then-President Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Greene and other Republicans eagerly repeated this lie.

On Dec. 21 2020, for example, then representative-elect Greene and other House Republicans attended a “planning session” at the White House to coordinate their objections to the election’s results during the joint session of Congress. “We aren’t going to let this election be stolen by Joe Biden and the Democrats,” Greene said afterward. She added: “President Trump won by a landslide.” Obviously, that was not true. Still, millions of Americans believed this lie — including the Jan. 6 inmates now held in D.C. Trump, Greene and other Republicans also led people to believe, falsely, that the election could be overturned during the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6.

Consider the case of Kyle Fitzsimons, of Lebanon, Maine, who was convicted of committing “five assaults against law enforcement officers over an approximately five-minute span” on Jan. 6. He is among the 20 Jan. 6 inmates held in D.C. On Dec. 24, 2020, Fitzsimons stated on Facebook that a “pretty obvious fraud” was being perpetuated against Trump. “Not since the rigged election of 1960 has a state sent dueling electors to D.C., and now we have 7 doing that this year,” Fitzsimons wrote, echoing the Trump team’s warped legal theories. As detailed in Chapter 3 of the Jan. 6 Select Committee’s final report, those “electors” were fake. They were part of Trump’s illegal scheme to overturn the election. They had no legitimacy, yet Fitzsimons evidently thought they did. 

Fitzsimons also believed that Trump could still be declared the victor on Jan. 6. Days after the assault on the Capitol, Fitzsimons explained to The Rochester Voice that he attended Trump’s rally at the White House Ellipse on Jan. 6. “The speeches from the morning were overtly preaching the election was not over, there was a path to victory through decertification, there was a plan to delay the certification by the House and Senate and then state legislatures would convene and (certify) the right result,” Fitzsimons said. This is exactly what Trump and his boosters in Congress sought to do. After listening to Trump’s speech, Fitzsimons changed into a butcher’s coat and marched to the Capitol, where he repeatedly assaulted officers.   

Other Jan. 6 inmates held in D.C. believed Trump’s big lie as well. Barton Shively, a former Marine from Mechanicsburg, Pa., pleaded guilty to assaulting two officers. Shively traveled to Washington, D.C. to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally. As part of his plea deal, Shively admitted that “his belief that the Electoral College results were fraudulent is not a legal justification for unlawfully entering the Capitol grounds or building and using intimidation to influence, stop, or delay the Congressional proceeding.”    

James McGrew, of Biloxi, Miss., and Carlsbad, Calif., pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement officers and has been sentenced to 78 months in prison. An FBI “tipster” explained that McGrew traveled to Washington to “protest” the “stolen vote.”

Jonathan Mellis, of Williamsburg, Va., is charged with multiple crimes, including assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers using a dangerous weapon. Mellis posted photos of himself on Facebook during the attack on the Capitol. He captioned the images, “Storming the Castle.” Mellis added: “We want a forensic audit of the vote.” 

On Jan. 6, Jessica Watkins, the Oath Keeper, posted images of herself and others on Parler, a right-wing social media site. She used the hashtags “#stopthesteal” and “#stormthecapitol.”

There are additional examples.

It’s clear that many of the Jan. 6 inmates held in D.C. — if not all 20 of them — believed the lies told by Trump, Greene and others.

But there’s something else the Republicans don’t want you to know: At least some of the Jan. 6 inmates in D.C. hold other extremist and conspiratorial beliefs.

As first reported by CNN, Fitzsimons publicly espoused the“great replacement” theory in 2017; that conspiracy theory is popular among white nationalists, who believe that elites are intentionally replacing people of European descent with non-white immigrants. Another Jan. 6 inmate, Robert Gieswein, reportedly endorsed “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories” during an interview the day before the Capitol attack. Gieswein has pleaded guilty to two counts of assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers.

Sean McHugh, who is charged with assaulting a law enforcement officer with a deadly or dangerous weapon, allegedly yelled at officers: “You guys like protecting pedophiles?” Many rightwing conspiracy theorists believe that a secret cabal of pedophiles rules the country. It should be noted that, according to published reports, McHugh was previously convicted of statutory rape.

Greene and her ilk want Americans to believe that the Jan. 6 inmates held in D.C. are victims of the U.S. government. That’s not true. The evidence shows that they believed the lies told by Trump, Greene, and others. After her visit to the D.C. jail, Greene insisted that the attack on the U.S. Capitol “was not an insurrection,” but that’s not true either. The Jan. 6 inmates disrupted the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our nation’s history.

Norman Eisen, retired ambassador to the Czech Republic, is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings and an expert on law, ethics, and anti-corruption. He was the chief White House ethics lawyer under President Obama and served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. He is co-counsel to the D.C. attorney general in the district’s civil case against the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys for the events of Jan. 6. He’s also a legal analyst for CNN.

Fred Wertheimer is president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works to strengthen our democracy and promotes government integrity. He has spent more than four decades working on democracy and governance issues, including campaign finance, ethics, lobbying and transparency reforms. Follow him on Twitter @FredWertheimer.

Tom Joscelyn was a senior professional staff member on the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol and has testified before Congress on more than 20 occasions.