Coop Scoop: Revealing the Trump Jan6 Hostages

Violent criminals, thugs and the mentally deranged

April 4, 2024

By Marc Cooper

Nowadays when Donald Trump is not on the stage thundering about the “bloodbath” being committed by maniacal immigrants ferried into the US by the current president, Trump is pounding the table in defense of the January 6 convicts who he now claims are “hostages.” This is just one part of a joint Trump-MAGA effort to rewrite American history and to sanitize, and actually celebrate the violent attacks on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  An attack that was not only incited directly by the then-president but that was also supposed to be a culminating act in a  Trump-led conspiracy that stretched over two months in an attempt to keep him illegally in power.

As of these first days in April the Trump campaign has now boiled down to these two main talking points: 1) that Joe Biden has opened the border to murderous immigrants and when they are not raping our daughters and wives to poison our bloodline, they are killing our brothers and sisters.  Trump has now contradicted some of his supporters, many analysts and several journalists who said the heated reaction two weeks ago to Trump referring to a “bloodbath” was over the top as he was just talking about a possible cut off in the sales of foreign cars…and not about actual blood.

Well…NO! There was Trump earlier this week behind a podium and behind him, inexplicably and certainly against all agency policy, was a row of dour looking uniformed cops.  On the podium was a professionally printed Trump campaign placard reading “Biden’s Border Bloodbath.”  The bloodbath, then, that Trump was referring to was the supposed massive wave of killings by immigrants (that does not exist).  So the term “bloodbath” is now central to Trump’s campaign.

Then there are the Jan6 “hostages.”  These are the Trumpanzees currently behind bars because they either plead guilty to crimes, were properly convicted of crimes, or are being held in pre-trial detention awaiting trial on charges that include violence, primarily against police (which did not seem to faze the row of pudgy coppers who stood as campaign props behind the Orange Jesus).  These are the convicted and often violent criminals that Trump now brands as “great people” and with whom he collaborated to record a version of the national anthem that now opens every Trump rally.

Thanks to important work by one of the under-appreciated great beltway reporters,  Ryan Reilly of NBC News, who did a deep dive on just who these “hostages” are, the findings are hair raising.  Trump’s celebration of this motley crew should be reason enough by itself to disqualify him for office.

Let’s review the actual facts.

The number of those charged for January 6 now tops 1350.  More than 500 have already been convicted. Many were given probation or short jail sentences.  Only the most violent were given serious jail time…and all of the violence was directed against uniformed police for 187 long minutes with the whole world watching it on live TV. 

The overwhelming majority of those sentenced to incarceration have already been released. Almost all of the remaining prisoners have been convicted of crimes that mostly include violent felonies.  I don’t think I need to waste any of our time making the distinction between a duly convicted criminal completing his or her sentence and a “hostage.” We get that, right?

But among those Jan6 arrestees still in jail there are a grand total of 15 who are in pre-trial detention and have not yet been convicted or exonerated of any crime (though there is also a presumption of innocence).  Judges can also presume which defendants awaiting trial are either a flight risk or a threat to public safety and therefore cannot be bailed out before trial. These folks, I imagine, are those that anybody wanting to “free” the hostages would be focusing on.  Reporter Reilly presents us with a mini profile of these defendants deemed too dangerous to receive bail and it certainly looks like they should, indeed, be kept locked up until trial.

You can click the link at the beginning of this essay to see all the details that Reilly has exposed about these people.  I suggest you open the piece.  But I will highlight a few of the key findings here.

One defendants has two previous convictions of violence against police. He’s accused on Jan6 of helping to lead the invasion of the Capitol and is accused of throwing a flash grenade into a tunnel filled with police, impairing their hearing in some cases for days.

Another jailed defendant stabbed a 19 year old to death in a park six months after January 6 and though he was not charged on grounds of self-defense he told police he had participated in the Jan6 assault and that he carried a firearm to the event.  The FBI had been looking at him but lacked evidence for any arrest until last month when investigators found video tape of this guy firing off two live rounds during the riot at the Capitol whereupon he was arrested and denied bail.

Another heroic American patriot now behind bars and awaiting trial was charged with using a chemical spray in an attempt to blind Capitol Police.  He’s facing three criminal charges and he gleefully admitted to them on an exuberant Facebook posting he put up on January 6 reading: “I grabbed a can from them and started spraying. I got it on video lol,” he wrote in a post on Facebook on Jan. 6 cited by the FBI. “F---ed those cops up.”   Earlier this year, good old Judge Chudkun found him to be incompetent and a recent report found he suffered from “delusional thoughts” and refused to take appropriate medication. He’s awaiting a psych evaluation and a possible trial.

An anti-abortion activist also being held was identified as the fourth person to penetrate the Capitol on January 6, using a stump of wood to smash open a window allowing him to crawl into the building, open a door and allow the entrance of hundreds of others rioters where he then went to chase officer Eugene Goodman up the stairs which was caught on TV.  After his arrest and initial release, he was arrested again in December 2022 and charged with plotting with a friend to murder FBI agents investigating him.  His crime partner has admitted this was their plan.

And the list goes on of those still being held pending trial: One rioter charged with repeatedly assaulting law enforcement officers, another charged with swinging a lead pipe at police, a former special forces veteran charged with attacking police with a flagpole that he used to stab a cop in the face, a woman who is yet another to have been found mentally incompetent, another “great” hero who has been dishonorably discharged from the US Army after shooting a handcuffed Iraqi cow herder in the head, showed up on Jan6 in full military tactical gear and stood on the front line for two hours furiously beating cops and throwing furniture at them. 

I will let you read the details of the other reprobates still being held in Reilly’s original and detailed reporting. 

This is extremely dangerous stuff.  I am sorry if you are put off by my progressive comparing of Trump with the rise of the Hitler, but tough taters, I am going to continue.  The excoriation of migrants as perpetrators of a bloodbath and as spoiler of our bloodline can be lifted almost directly from the pages of Mein Kampf.  And the celebration and glorification of these January6 criminals in no way, shape or manner departs from Hitler’s embrace of his SA Brown Shirts who comported themselves precisely in the same manner as the dregs of the January 6 criminals.

Trump has become so extreme so fascist-adjacent that it seems he has now lost none other than Karl Rove, the great mastermind of the Republican Right earlier in the century.  Appearing on no less than MSNBC earlier this week Rove denounced Trump’s hostage gambit in scathing terms: 

“And what those people did when they violently attacked the Capitol, in order to stop a constitutionally mandated meeting of the Congress to accept the results of the Electoral College, is a stain on our history,” Rove said. “And every one of those sons a bitches who did that, we oughta find them, try them, and send them to jail.”

“And one of the critical mistakes made in this campaign is that Donald Trump has now said, ‘I’m going to pardon those people because they’re hostages.’ No, they’re not. They’re thugs. There were people—some of them had automatic weapons at a hotel in Virginia hoping to be able to be called up… And so, why Trump has done this is beyond me. If he had said, ‘You know what? I trust our jury system, I trust law enforcement, anybody who assaulted the Capitol oughta be’—I mean, he said it once or twice, but now he’s appearing in a video with people who assaulted police officers with an intent to take the Capitol by force.

Rove also said Democrats would be foolish to not make this endorsement of anti-police anti-democratic violence a center of their campaign for Joe Biden.  “If they were smart, they’d take the January 6 and go hard at it,” Rove told MSNBC’s Ari Melber. “And they would say, ‘He wants to pardon these people who attacked our Capitol.’ I worked in that building as a young man. To me, the Congress of the Un

ited States is one of the great examples of the strength of our democracy and a jewel of the Constitution.” 

I agree with Carl Rove.  There, I said it! ++

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