Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It isn’t really news that Donald Trump tried to “weaponize” the federal government against his political enemies. After all, he did it right out in the open many, many times. Here’s just one example from October of 2020, before the election:

Donald Trump mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough.

Trump twice amplified supporters’ criticisms of Attorney General William Barr, including one featuring a meme calling on him to “arrest somebody!” He wondered aloud why his rivals, like President Barack Obama, Democratic nominee Joe Biden and former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton hadn’t been imprisoned for launching a “coup” against his administration.

“Where are all of the arrests?” Trump said, after several dozen tweets on the subject over the past 24 hours. “Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!”

How about this?

“Billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forest fires that, with proper Forest Management, would never happen. Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money. It is a disgraceful situation in lives & money!”

Or this from 2019:

During an impromptu press conference at the White House on Thursday, President Trump was asked by a reporter to be a bit more specific with one of the pejorative claims he’s been making in recent weeks.

“Sir,” NBC’s Peter Alexander said, “the Constitution says treason is punishable by death.”

Trump gave a slight nod of acknowledgment.

“You’ve accused your adversaries of treason,” Alexander continued. “Who specifically are you accusing of treason?”

“Well,” Trump replied, “I think a number of people. And I think what you look is that they have unsuccessfully tried to take down the wrong person.”

Who specifically?

“If you look at [former FBI director James] Comey,” Trump said, “if you look at [former FBI deputy director Andrew] McCabe, if you look at people probably higher than that.”

“If you look at Strzok, if you look at his lover Lisa Page, his wonderful lover. The two lovers,” Trump said. Here he’s referring to the two FBI employees who exchanged text messages disparaging Trump, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

Page and Strzok have sued the government for violating their privacy rights and that lawsuit is providing some sworn testimony that Trump also wanted to “weaponize” the government against his enemies in private.

John F. Kelly, who served as former President Donald J. Trump’s second White House chief of staff, said in a sworn statement that Mr. Trump had discussed having the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies investigate two F.B.I. officials involved in the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.

Mr. Kelly said that his recollection of Mr. Trump’s comments to him was based on notes that he had taken at the time in 2018. Mr. Kelly provided copies of his notes to lawyers for one of the F.B.I. officials, who made the sworn statement public in a court filing.

“President Trump questioned whether investigations by the Internal Revenue Service or other federal agencies should be undertaken into Mr. Strzok and/or Ms. Page,” Mr. Kelly said in the statement. “I do not know of President Trump ordering such an investigation. It appeared, however, that he wanted to see Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page investigated.”

Mr. Kelly’s assertions were disclosed on Thursday in a statement that was filed in connection with lawsuits brought by Peter Strzok, who was the lead agent in the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation, and Lisa Page, a former lawyer in the bureau, against the Justice Department for violating their privacy rights when the Trump administration made public text messages between them.

The disclosures from Mr. Kelly, made under penalty of perjury, demonstrate the extent of Mr. Trump’s interest in harnessing the law enforcement and investigative powers of the federal government to target his perceived enemies. In the aftermath of Richard M. Nixon’s presidency, Congress made it illegal for a president to “directly or indirectly” order an I.R.S. investigation or audit.

The New York Times reported last July that two of Mr. Trump’s greatest perceived enemies — James B. Comey, whom he fired as F.B.I. director, and Mr. Comey’s deputy, Andrew G. McCabe — were the subject of the same type of highly unusual and invasive I.R.S. audit.

It is not known whether the I.R.S. investigated Mr. Strzok or Ms. Page. But Mr. Strzok became a subject in the investigation conducted by the special counsel John Durham into how the F.B.I. investigated Mr. Trump’s campaign. Neither Mr. Strzok nor Ms. Page was charged in connection with that investigation, which former law enforcement officials and Democrats have criticized as an effort to carry out Mr. Trump’s vendetta against the bureau. Mr. Strzok is also suing the department for wrongful termination.

Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page exchanged text messages that were critical of Mr. Trump and were later made public by Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general under Mr. Trump, as he faced heavy criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill who were trying to find ways to undermine him.

The sworn statements from Mr. Kelly are similar to ones he made to The New York Times in November, in which he said that Mr. Trump had told him that he wanted a number of his perceived political enemies to be investigated by the I.R.S., including Mr. Comey, Mr. McCabe, Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page.kj

The IRS did audit both Comey and McCabe but claim it was just a very, very unlikely coincidence.

Trump has, as usual, projected his own corruption and criminality onto the Biden administration with all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over getting caught red-handed breaking the law. His acolytes and accomplices in the US Congress are happy to help (along with some sympathetic MAGAs in the government.)

There is a whole committee dedicated to investigation of weaponization of government. I’m going to take a wild guess that they are not going to look into any of Trump’s obvious, well-documented attempts to do it.

The denialists will never, ever accept climate change

The world is burning up right now with temperatures soaring even in places like the arctic. The scientific consensus is that this is caused by climate change and common sense can tell any yokel on the street that this is not normal.

However, the wingnuts will never accept this presumably because they either care more about their fossil fuel portfolios or they care more about owning the libs than anything else in this world.

Here’s an example from Paul Hindraker (aka Hindrocket for those of you who remember the good old days of blogging.)

This last week, the press has been full of alarmist headlines: Tuesday was the hottest day ever! No, Wednesday was the hottest day ever! Of course, you have to 1) define “ever,” and 2) believe that we have any idea what the average temperature is, over the whole Earth, on a particular day–let alone a particular day 1,000 years ago.

At Watts Up With That?, Paul Homewood comments:

The idea that we know the global temperature today is absurd in itself. But the idea that we actually know what it was on a given day 100 years ago, or 1000 years ago, never mind thousands of years ago is sheer fraud.

And the claim that it is hotter now than 5000 years ago is a total lie – there is abundant evidence that it was much warmer then.

Then there is this:

“It hasn’t been this warm since at least 125,000 years ago, which was the previous interglacial,” Paulo Ceppi, a climate scientist at London’s Grantham Institute, told the Washington Post.

Wait, what? I didn’t know they had SUVs 125,000 years ago. What made it warm then? You’re not supposed to ask.

This is an educated man not a snotty 6th grader. If the temperature was ever this hot before SUVs it means that it can’t be caused by SUVs today? Come on.

STEVE adds—Steve Milloy has an excellent column on this issue coming out tomorrow in the Wall Street Journal:

The global-warming industry has declared that July 3 and 4 were the two hottest days on Earth on record. The reported average global temperature on those days was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, supposedly the hottest in 125,000 years. . .

One obvious problem with the updated narrative is that there are no satellite data from 125,000 years ago. Calculated estimates of current temperatures can’t be fairly compared with guesses of global temperature from thousands of years ago.

It’s obvious that the point here is to insist, once again, despite growing evidence in front of our very eyes, that climate change caused by greenhouse gasses is bogus. Yeah, ok. I’m convinced.

The sad thing is that since owning libs is what tens of millions of our fellow Americans live for, they are all too eager to believe this.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, sending a strong sign of Democratic unity from one of the party’s most liberal members.

“I think he’s done quite well, given the limitations that we have,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the “Pod Save America” podcast Thursday. “I do think that there are ebbs and flows.”

Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist from New York, has sometimes bucked Biden and the party’s leaders, including voting against the deal the president negotiated with Republicans in May to raise the nation’s debt ceiling and casting the lone Democratic vote against a spending bill to keep the government operating and avoid a partial government shutdown.

She endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary and demurred in an interview last year when asked if she would support the incumbent president in 2024.

Biden is facing nominal primary challenges for next year’s election in self-help author Marianne Williamson and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Ocasio, when asked about whether she’d support Biden, said: “I believe, given that field, yes.”

The congresswoman said she felt Biden had a strong start in his presidency with the passage of the American Rescue Plan, aimed at relief from the impact of the pandemic, and the Inflation Reduction Act, a major climate and health care law.

“But,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “there are also areas that I think could have gone better.”

This person is so exceptional.

No SNL cold open. Season’s over and writers are on strike.

Politico:

A Washington, D.C.-based bar discipline committee concluded Friday that Rudy Giuliani should be disbarred for “frivolous” and “destructive” efforts to derail the 2020 presidential election in support of former President Donald Trump.

“He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” the three-member panel declared in a 38-page decision. “By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law.”

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1677398849751490566?s=20

Burn it down and start from scratch?

It should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans do not know much about what their government does or why or who is in charge. Fewer than half can name all three branches of government. A quarter cannot name even one. Philip Bump wrote recently, “On any given Election Day, after all, some chunk of the electorate is misinformed about who and what is on the ballot.” But there is lots of governement waste, fraud, and abuse squirreled away somewhere that should be eliminated so we can lower taxes. They’re sure of that.

Like this genius Vivek Ramaswamy who wants to eliminate 75% of career federal employees. People we’ve trained to know their jobs. People who know important shit most Americans aren’t even aware is being done. Yeah, those people have got to go.

OK business guy, imagine we applied this logic to corporations. Every few years, every corporation should fire every last employee, then try to staff up from scratch. That would work out great. https://t.co/VrZifmStqi

— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) July 7, 2023

I sat down recently with a grade-school friend I had not seen since I was maybe 15. He was retired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He’d captained vessels and flown planes as part of the agency’s data-gathering efforts. I asked if he’d read “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis. There’s a long section on what NOAA does as part of the Department of Commerce (for some reason). He had not. I told him he should.

“The Department of Commerce should really be called the Department of Information,” Lewis writes, because its real function is information-gathering and storage. The problem is its name isn’t particularly descriptive of what it does. Department of Information would not be much of an improvement. The department is also home to the National Weather Service (overseen by NOAA) which, if you are like me, you use several times a day. The National Climatic Data Center, here where I live, stores all that information. Weather.com and AccuWeather? They just repackage the data NWS and NOAA collect at public expense, then use it to sell ads at a profit. Trump apppointed AccuWeather CEO, Barry Myers, to run the NOAA. He argued that the government (his data supplier and competition) “should get out of the forecasting business.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis promises to eliminate the Departments of Energy, Commerce and Education, plus the Internal Revenue Service. That’s one more than Texas Gov. Rick Perry famously wanted gone. Except he could not remember the name of the Department of Energy. He eventually ran it and didn’t know what it does. Its name isn’t particularly descriptive of what it does either.

Here’s what Lewis in 2017 said the D.O.E. does:

Roughly half of the D.O.E.’s annual budget is spent on maintaining and guarding our nuclear arsenal, for instance. Two billion of that goes to hunting down weapons-grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists. In just the past eight years the D.O.E.’s National Nuclear Security Administration has collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs. The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it’s because of these people. The D.O.E. also supplies radiation-detection equipment to enable other countries to detect bomb material making its way across national borders. To maintain the nuclear arsenal, it conducts endless, wildly expensive experiments on tiny amounts of nuclear material to try to understand what is actually happening to plutonium when it fissions, which, amazingly, no one really does. To study the process, it is funding what promises to be the next generation of supercomputers, which will in turn lead God knows where.

Yup. That’s gotta go.

And all those other “woke” types who do things we don’t know anything about. Can their asses.

It literally doesn’t get any dumber than this

Terri Otten at TNR:

She’s a Barbie comrade, in a Communist Barbie world—or so say Republicans, who are doubling down on accusations that the upcoming Barbie movie is Chinese propaganda.

The film, which comes out July 21, stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken, who leave Barbie Land to explore the real world. In one scene before they leave, a rough, hand-drawn map of the world can be seen in the background. The map includes the so-called nine-dash line, a much-disputed division of territory in the South China Sea.

Senator Ted Cruz was one of the first U.S. lawmakers to weigh in, sarcastically tweeting, “I guess Barbie is made in China…” Fox News commentators speculated outright whether Barbie was Communist or not.

More Republicans have joined them. “While it may just be a Barbie map in a Barbie world, the fact that a cartoonish, crayon-scribbled map seems to go out of its way to depict [China’s] unlawful territorial claims illustrates the pressure that Hollywood is under to please CCP censors,” Representative Mike Gallagher, who chairs the House select committee on China, told Fox News Digital on Thursday.

Representative Jim Banks, who also serves on the select committee, accused the film’s producers of “endangering our national security.”

“We defeated the Soviet Union with Coke, Levi’s and James Dean. We need soft power superiority just as much as we need military superiority to win the new Cold War with China, and that’s impossible with Hollywood working alongside the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.

Representative Mike Waltz accused Hollywood of “hypocrisy” and slammed Barbie as “yet another disgraceful example of Hollywood being in the pocket of communist China.” Senator Marsha Blackburn accused the movie of “bending to Beijing.”

Leftist Hollywood’s new ‘Barbie’ movie shows a map that supports Communist China’s territorial claims to the South China Sea.

Looks like ‘Barbie’ is bending to Beijing to make a quick buck.

— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) July 5, 2023

Representative Mark Green warned Hollywood that continuing to spread Chinese propaganda would cost the industry federal support. “In no world should American films be spreading CCP propaganda,” he said. “I encourage all film studios to stand with integrity or lose support from federal entities like the DOD.”

In March, Green reintroduced the SCREEN Act, which would bar the U.S. government from helping American studios produce films if the movie is co-produced by a Chinese company.

China has used the nine-dash line to mark its controversial territorial claims in the South China Sea. Over the years, Beijing has tried to claim sovereignty over 90 percent of the region. Even though The Hague ruled in 2016 that China has no legal basis for its claims, the country has pressed on, building military installations on otherwise uninhabited islands in the sea.

Hanoi has already banned the Barbie movie for its inclusion of the nine-dash line, which Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei all say the marker violates their sovereignty. The Philippines is also considering banning the film.

For the record, here is the shot in question of the nine-dash line:

I read that Vietnam banned the Barbie movie over it containing a map depicting the Nine Dash Line, which was odd enough on its own, but nothing could have prepared me for this being the offending shot https://t.co/P2WcDYWDRp

— Taras (@Stellaratum) July 3, 2023

LOOK AT THAT “MAP”!!!!!

I need a drink…

Apparently, even Trump is sick of his mini-me

Vanity Fair:

Last month, an incredible report emerged about the lengths that failed-gubernatorial-candidate-slash-rabid-election-denier Kari Lake was going to in her quest to become Donald Trump’s 2024 vice presidential pick. Lake, sources told People, “spent a significant portion of her time at Mar-a-Lago during its open season,” so much so that she was apparently at the Florida resort “more than Melania Trump,” a.k.a. Trump’s wife. “Kari Lake is there all the time,” a person familiar with the matter told the outlet. “There’s a suite there that she practically lives in.” Yet, unfortunately for the VP hopeful, practically becoming roommates with Trump does not appear to be helping her chances. In fact, according to a new report, it’s quite the opposite.

Trump has apparently grown “less enthusiastic about Lake,” the Daily Beast revealed on Thursday. Why? According to people familiar with the former guy’s thinking, she’s a “spotlight hound” who is always striving for attention. (Sound like any ex-presidents you know??) And while her unflagging loyalty to Trump is obviously viewed as a positive, the 45th POTUS reportedly doesn’t like Lake “running around saying she should be VP.” Said another source close to Team Trump: “I think she is an effective surrogate, but I’m not sure she will be a VP pick. But who knows?”

I doubt even Trump is that stupid. Come on. Why would he do that when he could pick Kristi Noem who actually won the governorship of her state and is more his “style” anyway, if you know what I mean?

Personally, I think this is the winning ticket:

Go for it Rog.

Wishing Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter a joyful 77th wedding anniversary! The Carters married on this day in 1946 in their hometown of Plains, GA.

Photo Credit: Jimmy Carter Library pic.twitter.com/ng2s90UCcc

— The Carter Center (@CarterCenter) July 7, 2023

Wow.

I think this creeps me out more than anything I’ve seen in recent days. A Hollywood desperate to make money at the dying box office is sure to see this and decide that we need more of it:

Type the words “sound of freedom” into Twitter (decent people who wish to live good, happy lives should under no circumstances actually do this) and the search will yield dozens of triumphant reports crowing about the improbable victory of a film by that title over the likes of Indiana Jones at the box office this week.

That’s not, strictly speaking, accurate – Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny had already been out for five days, the first three of which out-earned Sound of Freedom’s opening-day take, when the new independent thriller came to theaters on Tuesday. But for a fleeting moment this past Fourth of July, while the intended audience of Indy’s latest outing was presumably spending time with their families and friends at barbecues or in other social situations, an unoccupied fandom rallied by the star Jim Caviezel claimed the day with a $14.2m gross versus Dial of Destiny’s $11.7m. No matter that these figures require selective, almost willfully misleading framing to allow for the David-and-Goliath narrative trumpeted by supporters; as the copious tweets accusing Disney of being in cahoots with a global cabal of high-power pedophiles make clear, the truth doesn’t have too much purchase around these parts.

However one chooses to slice it, Sound of Freedom has over-delivered on expectations in dollars and cents, a feat of profitability uncommon for a comparatively low-budget production without a major Hollywood-led promotional campaign. Judging by the robust round of applause that concluded the fully-seated screening I attended on Wednesday evening – and this, in the liberal Sodom of Manhattan! – it would seem that the folks at the two-year-old Angel Studios have tapped into a substantial and eagerly marshaled viewership.

Following that money leads back to a more unsavory network of astroturfed boosterism among the far-right fringe, a constellation of paranoids now attempting to spin a cause célèbre out of a movie with vaguely simpatico leanings. The uninitiated may not pick up on the red-yarn-and-corkboard subtext pinned onto a mostly straightforward extraction mission in South America, pretty much Taken with a faint whiff of something noxious in the air. Those tuned in to the eardrum-perforating frequency of QAnon, however, have heeded a clarion call that leads right to the multiplex.

Caviezel stars as special agent Tim Ballard, a Homeland Security Investigations operative who really did work for the state busting up child-trafficking rings for more a decade. (Or so he claims – the DHS can neither confirm nor deny the real Ballard’s employment history.) Even if he did not literally have the face of Christ, Ballard would still exude an angelic aura as he gently hoists dirty-faced moppets out of peril with the gravely uttered catchphrase: “God’s children are not for sale.”

In Sound of Freedom, he leads a unit to Colombia and eventually goes rogue on his single-minded quest to locate and liberate the still-missing sister of a boy he managed to save from sex slavery. The defenseless siblings are drawn into the nefarious clutches of their abductors in the stomach-turning opening sequence, which clinically walks us through the steps by which a glamorous and implicitly trustworthy woman poses as a modeling scout to round up the most apple-cheeked prospects and separate them from their parents. In a montage that plays like a JonBenét Ramsey fancam, she stokes our horror by primping the youngsters with red lipstick and suggestively mussed-up hair.

And yet a coating of plausible deniability covers a film that takes care to be the most anodyne version of itself, all while giving those in the know just enough to latch onto. The traffickers are anonymous foreigners, mentioned as “rebels” in an unspecified regional conflict with no connection to the alleged Clinton Crime Family, though a title card at the end points back to America as a hub for the “$150bn business” of exploitation. The religious dimension seldom extends beyond a god-fearing undertone, most perceptible in archetypes like the reformed sinner on the righteous path. (Character actor supreme Bill Camp classes up the joint as “Vampiro”, a former narco who gave up his profligate lifestyle after fornicating with a 14-year-old while in a cocaine haze.) The trafficking follows no motivation more elaborate than the servicing of rich predators, eliding all talk of body-part black markets and the precious organic biochemical of adrenochrome harvested as a Satanic key to eternal life. The first rule of QAnon: you don’t talk about QAnon where the normals can hear you.

Caviezel has saved that for his promotional media appearances, such as a recent drop-in to Steve Bannon’s show War Room on MyPillow proprietor Mike Lindell’s streaming channel Lindell TV. In the course of their interview, he conveyed the severity of the situation by explaining that an enterprising salesperson would have to move 1,000 barrels of oil to match the sum they’d get for filling one barrel with the rendered corpses of the innocent. Elsewhere, he’s parroted falsehoods about Pizzagate and other underground cells subsisting on human blood, all of it pointing back to a foundation of conspiratorial thought targeting the Jewish and transgender communities.

These zestier strains of scaremongering are absent in the text itself, but they lurk in the shadows around a film outwardly non-insane enough to lure in the persuadable; the disappointingly un-juicy Sound of Freedom pretends to be a real movie, like a “pregnancy crisis center” masquerading as a bona fide health clinic. (Our hero Ballard, by the way, went on to found the paramilitary rescue squad Operation Underground Railroad, a group criticized as “arrogant, unethical, and illegal” by the authorities. But then, they would say that. They’re in on it, this goes all the way to the top, etc.)

Those hoping for a few detached laughs at the deep-dish delusion sneaking onto the mainstream radar will be bored by the straight face donned for the duration of the run time – until, that is, a small counter in the corner of the credit roll warns of a “Special Message” in two minutes. Having dropped his character, Caviezel himself appears to say that though we might be feeling frightened or saddened, he’d like everyone to leave with a message of hope for the future. Directly after establishing that he’s not the center of attention here, he betrays an evident messianic complex by announcing that his movie could very well be the most important ever made, going so far as to compare it to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its campaign to shine a light on 21st-century slavery. This is all for the children, we’re told, but they can’t do much to save themselves, can they?

For the first time, a self-serving foundation peeks through the cracks of noble service, the lone honest beat in a purported exposé of scandalizing facts. All of a sudden, this snare of wild-eyed falsehoods starts to make sense, its scattered ideology falling in line under the organizing principle of hoarded influence. And right on cue, as if in divine affirmation, a QR code pops onscreen linking to a site that puts patrons two key strokes away from buying $75 worth of additional tickets for the movie they’ve just seen. Though we differ on the culprits and causes, everyone agrees that child trafficking is indefensible, a third-rail standing that also makes the subject effective as a cudgel. Caviezel’s final statement double crystallizes the nonetheless foggy stakes: if you’re not with us, you’re with them, whoever they are.

Jim Cavaziel is a wingnut’s wingnut. He’s always swum in the fever swamp, starring in Mel Gibson movies and the like. This one is a stealth QAnon project which makes it the worst thing he’s done yet. It doesn’t feature “frazzle drip” or anything quite that openly partisan but those in the know understand it and those who aren’t are slowly being seduced into this idea of an international cabal of pedophiles secretly running the world. A lot of people really seem to be drawn to that narrative. I can only guess why that might be.

Yes, Hollywood is “liberal.” But only if it doesn’t cost them money. And right now the movie business is in crisis. If this thing finds a bigger audience, you can bet they’ll be looking for other similar projects. And that’s not good at all.

Pierce: The narrative that sometimes has been pushed that this was a just a violent event that, there was violence on both sides.

Phillip: No, no. It was a violent event. Look, it was a violent event. Police officers were there doing their jobs pic.twitter.com/4zi9tPfAME

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 7, 2023

I watched that whole interview and found his excuses appalling. I know this guy is a defense lawyer and he’s just making his best case for his client but the gaslighting was so extreme I found myself screaming at the TV. The whole world saw what happened on January 6th. That these people think they can persuade us that we didn’t see what we know we saw is astonishing. Philip Bump takes a look:

Kenneth Thomas was convicted last month for his participation in the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. As he awaits his sentencing later this year, he sought permission to travel to Missouri to participate in a festival dedicated to defendants in Capitol riot cases, permission that the judge overseeing his case denied.

On Thursday night, Thomas’s attorney John Pierce joined CNN’s Abby Phillip to discuss the judge’s decision, with which he predictably disagreed. But over the course of the conversation, Pierce made a broader point about the events of that day: that Jan. 6 was not the violent event that so many have argued.

“January 6th was a very complex event,” Pierce told Phillip. “There were a lot of people who engaged in various kinds of conduct. Mr. Kenneth Joseph Thomas was found not guilty of engaging in violence on the Capitol grounds.”

This is true; the verdict form shows that Thomas was instead convicted on four counts of “assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers” and “disorderly or disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds” but not “engaging in physical violence in a restricted building or grounds.”

What Thomas engaged in, Pierce argued, didn’t constitute violence but a defense of his fellow protesters.

“He was there to protect other people,” Pierce claimed. “There is very clear evidence that there was excessive force by police officers and he was trying to assist an elderly person who was being beaten by batons when he was on the ground.”

Here, he’s referring to one of the moments described in the Justice Department’s criminal complaint against Thomas.

Body-camera footage, it asserts, “showed that, even after law enforcement officers pushed him back, THOMAS returned at least twice to punch or strike the officers with his fist and forearm. THOMAS continued to attack law enforcement this way or attempt to push them back for at least 25 seconds straight.”

In court — and, later, to the right-wing website Gateway Pundit — Thomas argued that this incident involved his trying to get police to give space to a fellow protester who’d fallen on the ground. In a video shared at Gateway Pundit, you can hear Thomas exhorting officers to “let him up.” He is seen in a camel-colored coat and light-tan baseball cap, pushing police back.

But this is only one moment cited in the complaint. There are two others in which Thomas allegedly resisted police efforts to clear the area.

“As the law enforcement officers advanced, THOMAS turned to his side, using his elbow and shoulder to strike the front line officers,” the complaint reads. Video “showed THOMAS push back against the officers in this way four more times and attempt to punch with his fist once, while ordering the rioters to ‘hold the line.’ ”

Footage Thomas shared on YouTube appears to show these moments. (Removed from YouTube, the video was preserved by jan6archive.com.)

“There was — look, the narrative that, with all due respect to your network, sometimes has been pushed that this was a — just a violent event, that there was violence on both sides,” Pierce told Phillip.

“No, no,” Phillip replied. “It was a violent event. Police officers were there doing their job.”

“Abby,” Pierce said, “some of the police officers were not doing their jobs. Some of the police officers were going way beyond doing their jobs including unjustified lethal force, okay?”

A bit later, he added that “the vast majority — I know this stuff better than you, with all due respect, way better. The vast majority of individuals who are on the Capitol grounds were there and they were peaceful.”

Phillip asked if that included his client; Pierce replied that “we argued at trial that it did and he was found not guilty.”

The divide in perceptions about the riot articulated by Pierce has existed since the attack itself. Do you consider the central aspect of the day to be that thousands of people were present near the Capitol without going inside, much less attacking police officers to do so? Or do you focus instead on those violent actors and their having facilitated the disruption of the counting of electoral votes? Most Americans focus on the latter, the dangerous, deadly exceptions.

But on CNN, as at trial and at the Gateway Pundit, the defense of Thomas draws a more nuanced line. Was Thomas demanding that protesters “hold the line” (as he himself apparently dug in) an unacceptable act of resistance to the police? Was his physically pushing police back, as in the animation above, just a manifestation of a political disagreement?

This question really gets to the heart of what occurred that day. Many of the protesters made clear in their chants and taunts that they believed the police should not stand in their way given that they, the protesters, were defending the Constitution from what they incorrectly believed was an illegitimate election. They thought the police should side with them — probably because they saw the police as siding with them in general. This was the “back the blue”/”blue lives matter” team! The ones President Donald Trump would recognize to applause at his campaign rallies! But here they’re siding with the left?

There’s a privilege in this. There’s a privilege in assuming that the police should stand aside as you try to overrun the Capitol, certainly, but there’s also a privilege in shrugging at having pushed police out of the way. In the midst of confused, angry protests, there’s often some jostling. And what Thomas is shown doing, at least in the available video, falls short of assaulting police in an effort to inflict injury. But is it therefore excusable? To Pierce’s point, is it even broadly representative? If your view is that the police are generally in alignment with you and should spend their time enforcing laws other people break, then: yes.

Republican politicians have spent the last two-plus years arguing that the government cracked down on Jan. 6 rioters as a proxy for the political right more broadly and/or that those imprisoned were “political prisoners.” Some of this is opportunistic. Some of it, though, is rooted in the idea that what occurred wasn’t really that bad. That the police generally were acting in a way that they shouldn’t have been acting. It’s the same impulse that pivots from the search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago to calls to defund the FBI — why are you doing this instead of investigating real crimes?

At another point in the video Thomas uploaded to YouTube, someone near him in the crowd can be heard shouting.

“This is a peaceful protest!” the voice says. “Antifa’s causing the problem!”

Even at that moment, it wasn’t their fault.

I once knew a very right wing man who found himself on the wrong side of police for the first time in his life in his 50s. One of them called him a “dirtbag” and he was extremely offended and couldn’t believe it. This was a person who had been as pro-police brutality as you can get. He just didn’t think it would ever be applied to a (white) man like him.

I think most of these people on January 6th assumed the cops would help them hang Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. But when that didn’t happen they turned on them.