Officer Attacked By Capitol Rioters Shames House GOP For Sticking By Trump

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Aquilino Gonell, who as an officer with the U.S. Capitol Police helped defend the Capitol against rampaging Trump supporters during their assault on the premises in 2021, spoke on Twitter this weekend about the impacts from actions of Kevin McCarthy and allies of his.

Gonell, amid medical consultations, ended up leaving his long stint in law enforcement after he was among the many officers seriously injured by the rioting mob. Now, Republicans in the House, who hold the (slim) majority in the chamber, have largely turned to trying to defend participants in the Capitol attack, whether through House Speaker McCarthy releasing tens of thousands of hours of security footage to the team at Fox News led by Tucker Carlson or Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) helping lead a visit on Friday to a D.C. jail where defendants from the Capitol attack, most of whom were accused of violence, are being held. Greene and others have turned potentially meaningful conversations about criminal justice reform and the fair treatment of prisoners into another round of stumping for the insurrectionists, raising deceptive accusations of unfair treatment.

“The moral injuries ⁦@SpeakerMcCarthy ⁩and his insurrectionists sympathizer[s] have created will never go away,” Gonell said Saturday. “We did our job. We protected them. Yet they defend the rioters who were hunting them and [their] colleagues. room by room. They betrayed us.” Trump himself also continues sticking by participants in the attack — and elsewhere in the GOP, support for the ex-president as he makes another presidential bid also remains high. There has been no widespread break with Donald among established Republican officials, and he still leads in many polls of the party’s primary.