On the opening Monday of the Democratic National Convention, Rep. Jamie Raskin beguiled his audience with a litany of Donald Trump’s alleged crimes against the Constitution.  The Javert to Trump’s Jean Valjean, Raskin wore his obsession on his sleeve.

 As early as May 2019, Raskin was calling for Trump’s impeachment based on the “overwhelming evidence presented to us from the special counsel in the Mueller report of presidential obstruction of justice.”  Any honest reading of the Mueller report would have shown the criminals to be those who conspired to frame President Trump for colluding with Vladimir Putin.  Almost nothing Raskin says, however, is honest, right down to his reason for wearing that hideous do-rag.

Raskin achieved peak glory in his role as impeachment manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial, this one for the events of January 6.  There, he helped convince the House to impeach Trump for “Incitement of Insurrection.”  One could almost forgive his many deceptions in that rush to judgment, given how little was known at the time.  Three-plus years later, Raskin has no such excuse.

Speaking before a convention crowd jazzed by the success of their coup against the sitting president, Raskin again accused Trump of “inciting insurrection against our own constitution.”  By this time, as Raskin knew, not even special prosecutor Jack Smith had accused Trump of insurrection.  For that matter, not a single one of the J6ers was charged with insurrection, a charge ludicrous on the face of it.

Although the House committee also shied from accusing Trump of insurrection, their deceptions helped seed the ground for Raskins’s DNC deceit.  “The rioters were inside the halls of Congress,” wrote committee chairman Bennie Thompson, “because the head of the executive branch of our government, the then President of the United States, told them to attack.”

This is nonsense. Both the House committee and Jack Smith completely omitted from their reports Trump’s plea to the crowd, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”  They leaned instead on Trump’s final exhortation, “We fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Trump made this remark about 1:10 P.M.  At 12:53 P.M., Ray Epps and his crew first breached the Capitol perimeter.  By 1:06 P.M., the undertrained Capitol Police began lobbing munitions into a still peaceful crowd on the west terrace of the Capitol. None of the people in that crowd heard Trump’s speech.  The Capitol is a good 45-minute walk from the Ellipse, where the speech was given.  If the protesters were incited to violence, it was not by Donald Trump.

In an impressively tasteless — and confusing — jibe, Raskin said of J.D. Vance, “They tried to kill your predecessor,” the “they” being the protesters, the “predecessor” being Mike Pence.  According to Raskin, “the mob chanted ‘hang Mike Pence.’”  A handful of people did say that, under whose provocation we do not know.

We do know, however, that the Capitol Police allowed a symbolic gallows to sit unmolested on Capitol grounds for more than five hours.  One Washingtonian told me that when he and his pals set up a volleyball net on those same grounds, the police had taken it down within five minutes.

One P.M. seemed to be the witching hour.  The Epps breach occurred just a few minutes before 1.  A small crowd breached another lightly guarded barricade minutes later.  At 12:58, a single individual pulled down the temporary fencing protecting the lawn.  The leader of the gallows crew, whose face was fully exposed, hung the noose from the cross beam at 1 P.M.  The pipe bombs at the RNC and DNC were each discovered within minutes of 1 P.M.  Shortly after 1 P.M. a man climbed high atop the media scaffolding with an electric bullhorn and echoed Epps’s command to go into the Capitol.

The “scaffold commander,” the pipe bomber, the gallows leader, and the temporary fence remover have at least two things in common: none of them heard Trump’s speech, and none of them, conveniently, has been identified.

Epps, the most obvious of the provocateurs, was smoked out by other J6 protesters.  Embarrassed into arresting him in late 2023, the DOJ slapped Epps on the wrist with a year’s probation.  Rebecca Lavrenz, a great-grandmother I profile in my book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, received a harsher sentence for walking into the Capitol through an open door and praying for 10 minutes.  Rachel Powell, another of the women I profile, got four years for helping to break a window.

Fond of hyperbole, Raskin painted a picture of the crowd as “extremists wielding baseball bats.”  Among the very few bat-wielders was a young black man named Emanuel Jackson.  Two weeks after January 6, the DOJ charged Jackson with “assault on a federal officer while armed with a deadly or dangerous weapon.”  Jackson repeated his attacks over a two-hour period.  His were arguably the most violent acts committed by a protester during the day.    

For all the obvious criminality, however, the DOJ allowed Jackson to slip back into his netherworld.  In a hearing on March 17, 2021, his attorney argued successfully for his release, citing Jackson’s “severe intellectual disability.”  Homeless at the time, Jackson had been given a bat and a few talking points about globalism by some unknown person.  Unmentioned by any media is that this practice has a name.  It’s called “bird-dogging.”

In 2016, Democrat operative Scott Foval told a Project Veritas undercover journalist how bird-dogging works.  “I’m saying we have mentally ill people that we pay to do s---,” said Foval, unaware he was being recorded.  “Make no mistake.  Over the last twenty years, I’ve paid off a few homeless guys to do some crazy stuff.”  On January 6 and the days following, no one in the media wanted to know who gave the bat and the talking points to Jackson.  He clearly did not fit their profile of a militant white supremacist.

One critical Raskin lie told was that “five people died that day.”  Raskin is close enough to this subject to know that there were only four: Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed Air Force veteran shot without warning by a Capitol Police lieutenant (now captain), Michael Byrd; Rosanne Boyland, beaten mercilessly over the head with a stick by Metropolitan P.D. officer Lila Morris after Boyland had been pulled unconscious from under a human pile; Kevin Greeson, who died of a heart attack minutes after a police flash bang exploded next to his head; and Benjamin Phillips, who also died of a heart attack in the excitement of the day.

The fifth person, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, died of a series of strokes on January 7.  Someone in authority — the New York Times would cite “two law enforcement officials” — made the conscious decision to have Sicknick “murdered” despite his death from natural causes unrelated to the events of January 6.

On January 8, the New York Times told its readers that “pro-Trump rioters” struck Sicknick with a fire extinguisher.  The Times added this chillingly fraudulent detail: “With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.”  To establish Sicknick’s martyrdom, authorities had his ashes placed in the Capitol rotunda.  To sustain the illusion, the medical examiner’s office sat on his autopsy report for more than 100 days until forced out by a Judicial Watch lawsuit.

Good soldier that he is, Raskin refrained from talking about the pipe bombs.  Everyone has, and none more conspicuously than Kamala Harris.  The pipe bomb story, as they know, may yet blow up in all their faces.

Check out Jack Cashill’s and Joel Gilbert’s 3-minute video, “KamalaGate.”

Image: Jamie Raskin.  Credit: Edward Kimmel via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped).