Federal ‘shock and awe’ campaign against Jan. 6ers suddenly rebounds

The federal government’s orchestrated “shock and awe” campaign against the Jan. 6 protesters is over, with President Trump’s pardon or sentence commutations for some 1,500 or 1,600 people targeted by Washington.

But it may be rebounding against the FBI and other agencies that participated.

“The shock may be gone for these defendants, but it may only be beginning for the Justice Department and the FBI,” warned constitutional expert Jonathan Turley.

The federal government essentially had admitted it wanted to scare and intimidate Americans after those protesters gathered in Washington on that day and objected to what they viewed as a skewed president election.

Evidence later confirmed their concerns, as the $400 million plus that Mark Zuckerberg handed out to election officials who often used it to recruit Democrat voters was revealed as an undue influence.

Further was the undue influence of the FBI’s decision to interfere with the results. That bureau claimed, falsely, that the Biden family scandals uncovered in the laptop computer Hunter Biden abandoned were Russian disinformation, when they all were true.

But while most of the protesters simply walked into the Capitol building and later left, some acted on their rage, vandalizing and even physically confronting police and security.

The government responded with a campaign to scare as many Americans as it could.

Turley explained, “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 had confirmed, “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 DOJ did this by keeping people in prison for offenses like trespassing. Government lawyers insisted that defendants be kept behind bars, sometimes in gruesome circumstances, for years awaiting trial. Then they enhanced charges and demanded lengthy prison sentences.

Turley confirmed the widespread opinion that those who engaged in violence should have been arrested and punished.

But he said the “excessive treatment of some of the January 6th defendants undermined the credibility of their prosecutions for many.”

“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 some cases,” he said.

He cited the case against “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 police officers 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.

The ultimate judgment in the cases came in the November election, Turley said.

“Trump ran on the promise to pardon these defendants and secured not just the White House but the popular vote.”

He noted, too, that even the Supreme Court rejected the Democrats’ argument that the events were an “insurrection,” in its ruling that rejected claims of “obstruction” leveled by prosecutors, leaving behind mostly trespass and unlawful entry claims.

He noted the agenda of the DOJ, “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.”

But now Trump has nominated Florida Attorney General Bondi to lead the department, a veteran prosecutor who has no “past ties or identification with the department.”

He said, “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.”

Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was caught on video admitting her own culpability for the protest-turned-riot because she rejected Trump’s offer of more troops to be on hand that day, took to social media to call Trump’s clemency “an outrageous insult to our justice system.”

Tonight, the President announced pardons and commutations of sentences for those who violently attacked the Capitol and law enforcement officers on January 6th.

The President’s actions are an outrageous insult to our justice system and the heroes who suffered physical scars and…

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) January 21, 2025

Her complaints did not generate sympathy:

“an outrageous insult to our justice system”…after Biden preemptively pardoned his family’s influence peddling going back 10 years?!! Not to mention your family’s stock trading… you haven’t got any credibility.

— David Asman (@DavidAsmanfox) January 21, 2025

And commenters reminded her of her own responsibility.

“You said it yourself you had the opportunity, the ability, and the responsibility to accept Trump’s offer for 10,000 National Guard troops on January 6th and declined. You know damn well those protesters were entrapped and provoked by circumstances that could have been avoided by decisions you should have made. Those pardons are not an insult to the system. The political persecutions were,” one said.

You said it yourself you had the opportunity, the ability, and the responsibility to accept Trump’s offer for 10,000 National Guard troops on January 6th and declined.

You know damn well those protesters were entrapped and provoked by circumstances that could have been avoided…

— Shawn Farash (@Shawn_Farash) January 21, 2025

Others pointed out that perhaps Pelosi should “lawyer up” as she was not among the Biden family members, friends and supporters, or the thousands of convicted murderers and criminals, who got Joe Biden pardons as he was leaving the White House.