Trump Has Petrified Freak-Out After Final Jan. 6 Report Released

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Donald isn’t happy.

After the House panel investigating January 6 released its anticipated final report, which stretches across the better part of 900 pages, he took to Truth Social. “The highly partisan Unselect Committee Report purposely fails to mention the failure of Pelosi to heed my recommendation for troops to be used in D.C., show the “Peacefully and Patrioticly” words I used, or study the reason for the protest, Election Fraud. WITCH HUNT!” Trump complained Thursday night.

As before when Trump made similar claims, he could have dispatched troops with the D.C. National Guard to the Capitol without substantial involvement by Pelosi, and every so often throwing in a word like “peacefully” or the comically even less effective “patriotically” doesn’t somehow change the basic reality of the months of incitement Trump provided for those who stormed the Capitol complex last year and put the lives of so many in danger. Excusing what happened — which was still not merely a protest — with allegations of election fraud isn’t some kind of magic spell to make everything better either.

In specific terms, Trump has then and now provided support and encouragement for the rioters. He has even talked about issuing pardons for individuals charged over the attack should he ever regain the presidency. Right now, that kind of talk could impact plea negotiations and trial proceedings. It provides defendants with a piece of argument to use as an excuse for sticking by their extremism, whether that’s in committing further violent acts — like the Capitol riot defendant from Tennessee who was recently arrested for plotting the murder of law enforcement personnel ostensibly involved in building the case against him — or just refusing to drop their claims about the last election and how their actions on the Capitol grounds were somehow justified.

Early on Friday, Trump was making what are just ridiculous claims about FBI agents supposedly orchestrating what was said online about the major candidates in the 2020 election. “ONLY Negative could be said about me,” he alleged. He’s just objectively inaccurate. “The FBI used Twitter and Facebook to bludgeon the 2020 Election to Biden,” he alleged. “Nothing Negative could be said about him, especially as it related to Hunter’s Laptop From Hell, and ONLY Negative could be said about me. They were illegally after “Trump” at a level of ferocity, hate and yes, desperation, that has never been seen in our Country before. Other Media companies were involved also. The change in the Election was Complete & Total, with Millions of votes switched, at least 17%. TRUMP WON, BIG!”

In this and other posts also on Truth Social, what Trump is trying to reference includes millions of dollars provided from the federal government to Twitter for the cost of the company’s compliance with federal requests for information. Complying with a request for information isn’t censorship, and any given request might never result in anything that reasonably approximates so-called censorship by a long shot. He has also complained about the role of warnings from federal officials in decisions at social media companies to temporarily limit the spread of negative reporting on Hunter Biden, a son of the president. There’s no evidence that any of this meant any votes anywhere were “switched,” either through technological manipulation or some critical level of impact on voters’ sentiment. (The Biden reporting was still very widely available!) The connections Trump is making are just fictional.