Federal Agents Arrest Trump Loving Rioter For Assault On Police

0
1421

As the wide-ranging national investigation into the January rioting at the Capitol continues, a California resident and Trump supporter named Daniel Joseph Rodriguez has been arrested by federal authorities over participating in the rioting and physically assaulting a police officer who was on the scene. Rodriguez is facing eight charges, ranging from assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers to theft of government property (he apparently stole an emergency escape hood). During the rioting, Rodriguez used a stun gun against D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Mike Fanone, and in footage from the scene, Fanone can be seen falling to the ground after suffering Rodriguez’s attack.

Fanone has shared that rioters who surrounded him on that fateful day chanted a demand to “kill him with his own gun!” As summarized by prosecutors, Rodriguez “assaulted an officer with an electroshock weapon during the riot at the U.S. Capitol and has recently expressed a willingness to kill police officers.” New York resident Thomas Sibick has also been arrested in connection to the assault on Fanone after having actually stolen the officer’s police badge, having then buried it in his backyard like some kind of demented participation trophy.

As summarized by HuffPost, Rodriguez “is a Trump superfan,” and he was even “a regular at pro-Trump demonstrations in Beverly Hills,” according to the publication. Trying to distance Trump and his political allies from the rioters is not only ridiculous but also a dangerous distortion of the facts. These rioters, who harbored murderous intent towards those who stood in their way, were operating under the inspiration of their leader, Donald Trump. Acutely, they hoped to forcibly stop the formal certification of Joe Biden’s election victory on the basis of Trump’s lie that the election had been rigged.

During a recent phoned-in interview on Fox News, ex-President Trump himself claimed that some of the rioters were “hugging and kissing the police and the guards,” which is a gross misrepresentation of what actually happened, as Rodriguez’s case exemplifies. Some 140 officers were injured in connection to the Capitol rioting, and the injuries were serious — according to Capitol Police officers’ union chairman Gus Papathanasiou, the injuries included “smashed spinal discs” and a stab wound from a metal fence stake. Those who would pretend like these horrors weren’t actually serious are craven liars.