Here’s a hot tip if you’re planning any US political protesting: don’t leave your hotel room key behind.
The obsessive pursuit of thousands of January 6 protesters – the vast bulk of whom caused no damage to property let alone people – by US law enforcement continues apace, more than three years after the riot.
Last week, the FBI arrested a 61-year-old nurse in North Carolina, Susan Lee Hodges, who made the mistake of dropping her hotel key card inside the Capitol building, which police used to obtain her name from the hotel, and then her home address from Verizon, a mobile phone company.
“Google location data shows that a device associated with her 5575 number was within an area consistent with the interior of the US Capitol building between 2.49pm and 3.34pm”, the FBI said in its arrest warrant published online last week, which additionally highlighted how Hodges yelled “freedom” while she was inside the building.
The West hasn’t yet reached CCP levels of surveillance, where government cameras on every corner track their citizens’ movements and utterances, almost 24 hours a day, but it’s getting close – all in the name of “safety”, of course.
“Hodges can be seen sitting on the couch and unpacking the contents of her backpack, including the red hat she had been previously wearing and can of what appears to be Coca-Cola,” the FBI’s accusation went on. Horrifying stuff. When she saw someone ripping something off the wall, “she realised that something was not right at that point and decided to leave … with the help of police officers who were ushering people out of the building”, the FBI noted.
For all this, Hodges has been charged with four crimes, including entering, remaining in and disorderly conduct in a restricted building, which will probably put her in prison for a few years.
Of 720-plus prison terms so far meted out to the more than 1235 arrested in relation to January 6, the average term has been a few years, according to a recent Washington Post analysis (a little less for those who pleaded guilty).
Even judges appear to have been surprised at the FBI and Justice Department’s vindictiveness, handing down punishments well below prosecutors’ requests in around two thirds of cases, according to the Post, a far higher share than usual.
It’s hard not to see all this as anything other than political persecution, especially when other more serious crimes barely go punished at all, including, for instance, the notorious bashing of New York City police offers in recent days by illegal immigrants, or the rampant unpunished shoplifting that blights big Democrat-controlled cities.
To be sure, it was unwise of Hodges to enter the Capitol building, but what is the public benefit of pursuing and demanding jail time for relatively harmless individuals who attended a protest, years after the fact? It destroys what remains of their often-modest lives, without obviously serving to reduce the likelihood of such riots occurring again.
The same zeal to track down rioters wasn’t observed in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020, who collectively caused far more death and destruction. And the scapegoating of January 6 protesters is worse given US authorities were in part to blame for the riot getting out of control, failing to provide extra security until well after hundreds of protesters had entered the building.
“Lock her up for a long time. Remember this face of a TRAITOR,” said ‘Linda’ in response to the announcement of Hodge’s arrest on X account Sedition Hunters, which describes itself as a “global community of open-source intelligence investigators working together to assist the FBI” incarcerate Americans who were at the protest. Perhaps sadder still is to observe the glee with which other Americans greet the incarceration of other Americans who obviously didn’t cause, or even plan to cause, any harm, and certainly not to them.
It’s part of what seems to be a pattern of bias against Americans who don’t support the Democratic Party, and selective enforcement of alleged crimes.
In October last year, Douglas Mackey was sentenced to seven months in prison for a tweet he made in the lead-up to the 2016 election, which encouraged Hillary Clinton supporters to vote via text. Naturally that was misleading, designed to suppress the vote before his 58,000 Twitter followers.
If you don’t find the sentence severe, perhaps the timing: he was arrested six days after the Biden administration took control of the Justice Department, on January 27, for a crime that occurred in 2016. For all the determination to lock up January 6 protesters, the FBI has had little success in trying to work out who planted a pipe bomb at the Democrat National Committee headquarters in Washington DC on January 5, 2021.
Bizarrely, this potential mass murder, including of then Vice-President Elect Kamala Harris, who was in the DNC when the bomb was allegedly active, has received almost no scrutiny and the suspect has not been found, despite a $US500,000 FBI reward still on offer.
In recent weeks, new video footage has emerged revealing the discovery of the pipe bomb on January 6 by a non-uniformed police officer. He informed nearby Secret Service agents, who seemed uninterested in a bomb only a few metres away, even allowing schoolchildren to walk past.
Republican congressman Thomas Massie openly suggests the bomb must have been a fake, and was planted as a fall by authorities who were working with Democrats in case the January 6 riots didn’t get out of control.
Donald Trump has promised to pardon the non-violent protesters should he win re-election in November. He might also want to add an investigation into who planted the pipe bomb.
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