By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2025-01-21 02:48:22 | Updated at 2025-01-21 14:06:21
11 hours ago
On January 20, 2025, the “shock and awe” campaign of the Justice Department came to an end as President Donald Trump pardoned 1,500 January 6th defendants.
Four years ago, the Justice Department set out to send a chilling message to the nation. In an interview with CBS News a year later, Justice Department official Michael Sherwin indicated that they wanted to send a message with the harsh treatment of defendants.
Sherwin explained that “our office wanted to ensure that there was shock and awe … it worked because we saw through media posts that people were afraid to come back to D.C. because they’re, like, ‘If we go there, we’re gonna get charged.’ … We wanted to take out those individuals that essentially were thumbing their noses at the public for what they did.”
The awe is gone but the shock remains at the Justice Department.
If Sherwin and his colleagues hoped to “Trump proof” that nation, they failed in spectacular fashion.
While there was ample basis for criminal charges, the excessive treatment of some of the January 6th defendants undermined the credibility of their prosecutions for many.
That is no easy feat.
Most of us denounced the January 6th riot as a desecration of our constitutional process.
Those who engaged in the rioting, and most importantly the violence, needed to be punished.
However, what followed left many of us increasingly uneasy.
The Justice Department rounded up hundreds and, even though most were charged with relatively minor crimes of unlawful entry or trespass, the Justice Department opposed the release of many from jail and sought absurdly long sentences.
In my recent book, “Indispensable Right,” I discuss these cases and their troubling elements.
A good example is the handling of the most well-known case of the so-called QAnon Shaman.
Bare-chested, wearing an animal headdress, horns, and red-white-and-blue face paint, Jake Angeli Chansley became the iconic image of the riot.
Seeking to make examples of these defendants, the Justice Department took special measures in hammering Chansley. He was held in solitary confinement and denied bail.
Chansley was treated more harshly because of his visibility. It was his costume, not his conduct, that seemed to drive the sentencing.
In the hearing, Judge Royce Lamberth noted, “He made himself the image of the riot, didn’t he? For good or bad, he made himself the very image of this whole event.”
Lamberth hit Chansley with a heavy 41-month sentence for “obstructing a federal proceeding.”
However, long withheld footage, showed recently that Chansley (like hundreds of people that day) simply walked into the Capitol past Capitol police guards and then being escorted by officers through the Capitol.
At one point, two officers not only appear to guide him to the floor but actually try to open locked doors for him.
Chansley is shown walking unimpeded through a large number of armed officers with his four-foot flag-draped spear and horned Viking helmet on his way to the Senate floor.
Does that make Chansley’s actions acceptable, let alone commendable?
Of course not.
He deserved to be arrested and punished.
However, what many saw was a troubled individual being made an example for others.
In my book, I discuss how, in history, “rage rhetoric” was allowed to become “state rage.”
This is one such case.
Trump ran on the promise to pardon these defendants and secured not just the White House but the popular vote.
It was not just the public that rejected the narrative of January 6th as an “insurrection.”
In the recent Supreme Court decision in Fischer v. U.S. to reject hundreds of charges in January 6th cases for the obstruction of legal proceedings, the Court left most cases as simply a mass trespass and unlawful entry.
The shock may be gone for these defendants, but it may only be beginning for the Justice Department and the FBI.
When the campaign of Hillary Clinton secretly funded the infamous Steele Dossier to launch the Russian conspiracy investigation, it was the Justice Department that was not just the willing but eager partner.
The “insurance policy” described by former FBI official Peter Strzok was redeemed in investigations that derailed much of Trump’s first term.
Later, it was the Justice Department again that pursued a no-holds-barred effort to convict Trump before the election.
The Justice Department is the hardest of silos in Washington to reform.
Unlike most departments, it is largely homogenous, with thousands of lawyers who share professional and cultural ties.
It is a department composed of people who are by their very definition, litigious.
Many are likely shocked by this turn of events.
The feeling of predators becoming prey is inescapable.
Trump insisted on selecting an Attorney General, nominee Pam Bondi, who has no past ties or identification with the department.
For the Justice Department, it must feel like the Visigoths arriving at the gates of Rome . . . only to be let in by the citizens.
According to polling, the public ultimately found the “barbarians” less threatening than those who have insisted that Rome would fall.
That must certainly be shocking for many in Washington, but the record of the Justice showed how the awe can become awful when officials feel the license of state rage.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
