It’s not unusual for any Senate hearing, no matter what the topic, to include some questions that attempt to get the witnesses to agree on political points. After all … Senate. But it is pretty unusual for a senator to use the questioning of witnesses by a rare joint Senate committee as an opportunity to go completely off the rails by pushing a conspiracy theory authored by an anti-Muslim hate group as a means of pushing the idea that the entire assault on the U.S. Capitol was a “false flag” operation.
On Tuesday, as the Senate’s investigation into the events of the Jan. 6 insurrection got underway, the irony of Sen. Cancún Cruz and Sen. Heil Hawley getting their chance to question law enforcement officials—rather than being across the table from them in small, brightly lit rooms—was sad. Cruz, sporting a fresh burn from his time in the media spotlight, restricted his questions to the purely reasonable. Hawley also started off in the land of reality, but couldn’t restrain himself from spending his last minute attacking Nancy Pelosi and retired Gen. Russel Honoré.
Still, nothing that they did held a candle (or a tiki torch) to the actions of Sen. Ron Johnson. Because rather than ask law enforcement about any of the events on Jan. 6, Johnson told them what happened. And what happened, according to the man who is honest-to-God sitting in Russ Feingold’s old chair, was that the Capitol was overcome by “fake Trump protesters” as the police incited a riot by good people.
Where most hearings involving witnesses generally include the idea of asking those witnesses questions, Johnson was having none of that. Oh, he said he had questions. So many questions. Only he was going to submit those in writing on another day.
Instead Johnson pulled out a statement from the leader of an anti-Muslim hate group, to explain why his “eyewitness” testimony was more valuable than that of any of the police officers on the scene, or the 300 million Americans who watched the tragedy unfold in real time. That’s because this witness had magic calibrated eyeballs, making him capable of discerning real Trump supporters from fake antifa infiltrators.
Real Trump supporters are “jovial” and “friendly” people of the “working class.” But others don’t fit in. These people are, quoting now: “plain clothes militants, agent provocateurs, fake Trump protesters, and disciplined uniformed column of attackers.” These are the people who, according to Johnson, planned the attack on the Capitol.
But Johnson wasn’t done. Not by a long shot. According to his expert not-appearing-at-this-hearing witness, marchers were thrilled by the “courtesy gesture” of not seeing Capitol Police on every corner. With this invite, the Trump supporters “surged” toward the Capitol. In a good way. In a “talkative and happy” way. Because, after all, if they didn’t see any police trying to stop them, that was a perfect reason to step over, around, or through four levels of barricades between the street and the Capitol grounds.
Everyone was in “high spirits” until what “seemed like a scuffle” broke out between people in “ordinary clothes.” However, even though these people were wearing ordinary clothes that “fit right in with MAGA people,” Johnson’s expert could tell they were “plain clothes militants.” How he could tell is unexplained. Maybe he had X-ray specs. These people that looked exactly like regular Trump supporters but were clearly not as happy, talkative, jovial, or friendly got into a brief “tussle” with police. Then one of the police officers “fired a tear gas canister, not at the plain clothes militants at the front line, but into the crowd itself.” Apparently, police were unable to see the very subtle difference between good Trump supporters and evil fake Trump supporters that was obvious to Johnson’s pal.
This “changed the crowd’s demeanor” because “all of a sudden pro-police people felt like the police were attacking them,” read Johnson. “The pro-police crowd went from confusion, to anger.”
Then, having explained that the police were actually responsible for the deaths and injuries to police because they made all those jovial pro-police people angry, Johnson tried to enlist the police officials gathered in front of him in his claims that the police were to blame for Jan. 6. Which is not exactly how it looks on body cam footage.
Shockingly, this did not go well. He started off asked former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund if it wasn’t true that Trump supporters were pro-police. Sund’s reply was that he didn’t know about that. However, he did note that some of the people shoving their way through police lines and assaulting his officers actually claimed to be police themselves. Somehow, that’s a lot more believable than Johnson’s claims about “agent provocateurs.” Funny how the people who have been arrested so far look like Trump supporters.
But of course, this is all scoring it wrong. The way it works is: Real Trump supporters are the ones who haven’t been arrested. Yet.