The AG’s testimony about the white-supremacist threat, and that posed by the Capitol riot, needs unpacking.
The AG’s testimony about the white-supremacist threat, and that posed by the Capitol riot, needs unpacking.
I n the latest episode of The McCarthy Report, Rich Lowry and I explored Attorney General Merrick Garland’s claim that he has never, in his long career in law enforcement and as a federal judge, seen a “more dangerous threat to democracy than the invasion of the Capitol” on January 6. If I were inclined to take Garland seriously, I’d be stunned. But, alas, he is best understood as just another spouter of the insidious narrative that currently drives Democratic politics — and not for the first time.
As detailed in reporting by NR’s Caroline Downey, the AG said last week that the top domestic extremist threat comes from “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race.” Garland’s remarks, which were echoed by Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, came during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on domestic terrorism.
So why is the AG’s assessment so astonishing in light of professional experience?
I came to know and admire Garland when he was a high-ranking Clinton Justice Department official. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the subsequently thwarted plot to bomb New York City landmarks happened on his watch. So did the attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 members of the U.S. Air Force were killed. That is, Garland was not merely dealing with the onset of a jihadist wave in the United States but the strategic support of that project by Iran, which choreographed the Khobar Towers strike, backed anti-American militarism by both Sunni and Shiite jihadist organizations, and induced the Clinton administration to frustrate the FBI’s investigation.
In the interim, Garland took a very hands-on role in DOJ’s response to Timothy McVeigh’s April 19, 1995, bombing of the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City. McVeigh was ultimately convicted and put to death — punishment that reflected the atrociousness of his crimes.
The prosecution of McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who conspired with him, makes for a useful comparison to the January 6 unrest. Nichols received a sentence of life imprisonment without parole, and was subsequently prosecuted by the state of Oklahoma, too — not surprising given that, though he was not nearly as culpable as McVeigh, the bombing involved the mass murder of 168 people, including children and law-enforcement officials. Another 759 people sustained injuries, many of them life-shattering.
Regarding January 6, by contrast, the Justice Department is struggling to develop serious charges against the “invaders” it has identified, many of whom were merely trespassing, and some of whom convincingly claim that they never entered the Capitol. Hundreds of people did, of course. Some in the mob fought with security forces (as many as 100 police officers may have been injured to some degree or another). Some committed acts of vandalism. All of that was felony conduct, to be sure, but nothing like the destruction and loss of life probed in Garland’s Oklahoma City case. That is why Congress was able to reconvene a few hours after order was restored.
President Clinton appointed Garland to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1997, and he served on that distinguished tribunal for nearly a quarter-century. He was thus there when al-Qaeda bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 224 people; when the same jihadist organization bombed and nearly sank a naval destroyer, the U.S. Cole, at the port of Aden in 2000, killing 17 American sailors; and when 19 al-Qaeda jihadists killed nearly 3,000 Americans on a single day while obliterating the World Trade Center, striking the Pentagon, and crashing Flight 93. The last of those atrocities is theorized to have been an effort, heroically thwarted by passengers and crew, to destroy the Capitol and murder all of the hundreds of people inside of it.
By contrast, only one person, a pro-Trump rioter, was killed — by security forces — at the Capitol on January 6. Contrary to claims that the Democratic-controlled House made in its impeachment article against then-President Trump, the rioters did not kill Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick by bashing him over the head with a fire extinguisher — an allegation Democrats repeated for weeks, citing reporting in the New York Times (see our Michael Brendan Dougherty’s column). Officer Sicknick died of natural causes (strokes) on January 7; he was not hit over the head with a blunt object, and though he was allegedly assaulted with bear spray (like a few other police officers), he returned to his office after the unrest ended and told his brother, in text messages, that he was fine. It cannot be ruled out that the stress at the Capitol may had some contributory effect in the officer’s demise, but no one has been charged with homicide — even though two men have been charged with assaulting him (in a Justice Department complaint that does not even mention Sicknick’s death — it says he was incapacitated by the spray for about 20 minutes).
Garland’s testimony that the threat posed by the January 6 uprising alarms him more than past abominations he has experienced in his career is thus absurd. But it is of a piece with months of Democratic messaging.
Obviously, the message we are supposed to take away from Garland’s remarks is that white supremacism is the most dangerous terrorist threat facing the country. But that is not actually what Garland said in his lawyerly way. In the pertinent part, he testified: “I think it’s fair to say that in my career as a judge, and in law enforcement, I have not seen a more dangerous threat to democracy than the invasion of the Capitol” (emphasis added). He elaborated:
There was an attempt to interfere with the fundamental passing of an element of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power. And if there has to be a hierarchy of things that we prioritize, this would be the one we’d prioritize. It is the most dangerous threat to our democracy.
This was against the backdrop of his pronouncement that:
Domestic violent extremists pose an elevated threat in 2021 and in the FBI’s view, the top domestic violent extremist threat we face comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race.
Let’s unwind this.
Garland is attempting, with a straight face, to claim that January 6 and the forces behind it are more perilous than terrorists who’ve cold-bloodedly slaughtered thousands of Americans. Naturally, he can’t bring himself to say something so inane, so he tries to prop up this partisan storyline by depicting a concept, “our democracy,” as if it were the American people themselves — incarnate, and in imminent danger of being mass-murdered. But bad as January 6 was, it was not terrorism, the American people are not at imminent, widespread risk of being killed by white supremacists, and our resilient democracy has survived a lot worse than rioting by disgruntled Trump supporters.
As we’ve noted many times, “violent extremism” is Obama/Biden-speak for terrorism — a word that Democrats avoid because they are politically aligned with Islamist organizations. Those groups, many with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, object to the word terrorism because of its (entirely justified) association in the public mind with jihadist attacks. The not-so-subliminal message here is that you are supposed to see the January 6 uprising as racially motivated terrorism, committed by people who were scheming to establish the superiority of the white race.
That is ridiculous. The seriousness of a demonstration that devolved into a riot, which had the unconstitutional objective of preventing Congress from counting state-certified electoral votes that would confirm Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election, should not be minimized — it must be condemned. But let’s not turn it into something it wasn’t.
It was not a terrorist attack, much less an “insurrection”; it was a riot. And how precious of Democrats: They insist on labeling as “mostly peaceful demonstrations” the anti-police riots that raged across the country last summer (and that continue in some hot spots); yet they claim riot is not a strong enough word for the Capitol uprising, though it was far shorter and significantly less lethal than the riots Democrats won’t admit were (and are) riots.
January 6 was an execrable interference with a mandatory constitutional process (just as rioting that killed people and destroyed businesses last summer was an execrable interference with a plethora of constitutional rights and interests). But January 6 was not an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States.
What the Trump supporters wanted was unconstitutional. Specifically, they wanted the federal government to reject the certification of several states’ electoral votes based on unsubstantiated claims of fraud, wrongly assuming that this would cause the results to be tossed back to Republican-controlled state legislatures, which would reverse the popular election and shift the electoral votes to Trump.
In addition, the way that many Trump supporters went about their protest was illegal — although the worst of the illegality, involving assaults on but not killing of police, seems to have been carried out by a comparatively finite subset of the thousands of demonstrators.
To describe this is not to minimize it. For President Trump, who was sworn to uphold the Constitution, it was impeachable misconduct to pressure Vice President Pence and members of Congress to violate their constitutional responsibility to conduct a ministerial counting of the electoral votes (i.e., to respect that, in our system, states exercise sovereign control over the certification of their presidential elections). It was also impeachable conduct for the president, as commander in chief, to be derelict in responding to violence against security forces in the seat of our government. For a president to do such things is shocking. Moreover, the miscreants who were implicated in illegal acts are being prosecuted, as they should be — everyone from those who were complicit in violence and vandalism down to those who were present and obstructing a congressional proceeding without lawful authority.
All that said, though, in every other instance of even heinous crime and abuse of power, we are able to distinguish such malevolence from episodes of wrongdoing that are categorically worse, including terrorist attacks and attempts to overthrow the government. And when we do so, Democrats often bleat that we should sympathize with the criminals and blame ourselves for the root causes of their crimes. Our capacity to draw these distinctions should not hinge on whether Democrats find it politically expedient to engage in hyperbole.
Because today’s race-obsessed Democrats see white supremacism (the progenitor of “systemic racism”) as the cause of every societal ill, they frame January 6 as not a politically motivated debacle but a white-supremacist insurrection. Importantly, the Left portrays all opposition to government, especially to progressive big government, as white racism (because, you see, progressive government is our only hope for dismantling systemic racism).
That, too, is specious.
It is undeniably the case that some extremist anti-government groups have racists and anti-Semites among their members, and some of these groups (such as the Proud Boys) have members who exploited January 6 as an opportunity to make mischief. It is also true that the rhetoric of these groups, echoing the rantings of Timothy McVeigh, features allusions to The Turner Diaries, an anti-government tract from the 1970s, written by an anti-Semitic white supremacist.
Yet — and this is so obvious it shouldn’t need saying — it is simply not true that it is racist to oppose the expansion of the government, and to urge that the government respect the limitations on its authority prescribed by the Constitution. It would be no more true to claim that every Democrat who advocates an expansion of Obamacare is a Communist, or that every Democrat who sympathizes with aspects of the Black Lives Matter agenda is an anti-white racist.
It is worth remembering that McVeigh’s victims were overwhelmingly white. Racism simply was not a factor in the Oklahoma City bombing, which was anti-government terrorism. The January 6 uprising overwhelmingly featured Trump supporters who believe the election was stolen (or at least say they do) and who oppose Democrats. It also featured, for example, members of the militia group Oath Keepers, which claims to defend the Constitution but rejects white supremacism.
That the January 6 riot was appalling does not mean it was a racist revolt. And, unlike McVeigh and jihadist terrorists, the Capitol rioters didn’t kill anybody or obliterate an iconic American complex. Merrick Garland understands these distinctions as well as anyone who has ever served as attorney general, even if you wouldn’t know it from listening to his testimony.