Insurrection/Riot More Than Just ‘Traveling Entertainers’

January 1, 2022

Here this mid-day Saturday in California’s Central Valley, more new-year wise-acre shit, and some news on T-Rump’s emotional part in the DC coup-attempt now nearly a year ago — first smile (h/t Just An Earthbound Misfit):

Maybe a New Year day-one surprise and maybe we can ease up on the screaming — good news maybe from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection/riot at the US Capitol with at least a coming public platform of all the dirty-deed investigations/document collections/testimonies they’ve made this past six months.
Via Raw Story this morning:

Speaking to MSNBC on Saturday, Guardian reporter Hugo Lowell warned that the coming weeks of the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol would incriminate the White House.
He explained that over the past several weeks, more and more information had been submitted that will implicate former President Donald Trump and his staff.
The new year will bring open hearings to air live on television so Americans can understand the extent of the coordination between rally organizers, Republican officials in Congress and Trump campaign allies staged at the Willard Hotel.

“The Select Committee is unlikely, I think, to issue an interim report in the next few weeks and months, but what they are going to do is hold a series of televised public hearings where they want to show the American public what the committee has learned in its closed-door evidence gathering process to date,” said Lowell.
He went on to say that the committee has interviewed about 300 people and has obtained over 30,000 documents that include emails, text messages, and other bits of information to implicate those involved.

“Including, of course, Tump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who turned over a series of really damning messages that seemed to incriminate the White House and Trump, and Trump’s sons, and Fox News hosts, and Republican members of Congress, so this is a really big deal,” Lowell continued.
“And this is going to feature large in how the committee moves forward. They’re still going to be doing investigations and evidence gathering on the side, but I think they’re going to really ramp up the pace and try and share with the American people what they’ve learned to date.”

Lowell also said the committee will disclose all that shit from the National Archives the T-Rump has been seeking to block, and the group with “scrutinize Trump” for all the shady bullshit he and his toadies were trying to pull that first week of ‘last year.’
Here’s the MSNBC clip:

In the agenda of a new year, at least that’s something to look forward to, hopefully early on.

Yet an off-the-radar story of the Jan. 6 coup attempt is the staff who also weathered the horrid insurrection/riot that day, and are feeling a PTSD-influenced shitstorm — from The Washington Post this afternoon:

The House staffer quit after awakening one night and imagining a pack of Proud Boys amassing outside his apartment door. Another left after questioning whether strangers he encountered had helped plot the insurrection. A police officer resigned, still agitated by the frantic voices of co-workers she recalled hearing on her radio scanner that day.

“What’s the plan?” one had asked.

“I’ve got an officer down!” another had shouted.

A year ago, they all worked at the U.S. Capitol, a citadel of American democracy they believed was as impervious to attack as any center of Washington power.
But Jan. 6, 2021, upended all that. An invading mob of Donald Trump’s followers destroyed that sense of security — not only on that day but in the long year that followed.

“There’s a dark cloud over Capitol Hill,” said Jodi Breiterman, a Capitol Police officer who submitted retirement papers in November after almost 21 years on the force, and will officially leave the agency in mid-January.
“I look at officers’ faces, and they’ve changed. They’ve lost weight and they don’t know why.”

Yet alongside the political leaders, there were hundreds of Capitol workers who suffered their own trauma that day. They are the supporting cast on the edges of Washington’s biggest stage: the legislative aides, police officers, custodians and cafeteria workers who keep the business of government moving and ensure that the Capitol is safe, clean and well-functioning.

In many cases, they soldiered on after the insurrection, entrenched in positions that can be high-pressure and demanding even on routine days.
But for other Capitol workers, Jan. 6 became a psychic tipping point, a reason to leave jobs that had made them targets for threats and potential danger.

Another former House staffer, a Democrat who quit months after Jan. 6, said the toll of that day grew as time passed.

“I got to the point where my mental health just took an absolute nose dive because I was still trying to process all this stuff,” said the former aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she fears retribution from Trump supporters.

Death threats continued to arrive daily by phone from constituents who were convinced that Democrats had stolen the election.
“It absolutely broke me to know that people would be fine if my boss was dead, if I was dead, if my co-workers were dead,” she said.
“The American people stopped believing in the institution. And if they don’t believe in it, what the hell are any of us doing working for it?”

Go read the whole piece, shitty shit. How the living shit can Republicans claim the incident was caused by a tourist crowd?
A visual on the attack — via the Post last January:

Beyond shit-on-a-stick — once again, here we are…

(Illustration out front and above title quote: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Les Deux Saltimbanques: l’Arlequin et Sa Compagne,’ found here).

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