And this isn’t about your politics or what news channel you watch after a long day with the Bureau. It isn’t about whether you believe local prosecutors weren’t tough enough on crimes committed during street demonstrations in the summer of 2020. It isn’t about whether — after all the court cases and investigations — you still believe the people on the Hill that day had legitimate grievances. It also isn’t about whether — having watched the videos of bear spray and tactical gear and the beating of police officers and the calls for hanging the vice president — you believe most of them were just good people led astray by a lying demagogue.
None of that matters because surely you agree on one thing: Jan. 6 can’t happen again. No Americans, whatever their politics, whatever their personal grievances, can ever again try to interfere in the operation of laws governing the election of a president. We have a Constitution and statutes and courts so a mob can’t rule in the United States. The FBI’s job is to send the message that it can never happen again, if we are to remain a nation under law.
Normally, when you make criminal cases, you are thinking about personal deterrence or incapacitation, two of the main goals of criminal prosecutions. That is, you are making a case to keep a bad guy from hurting someone else. Of course, there are Jan. 6 cases like that, and I suspect all agents agree that anybody who hit a cop or ransacked a room or conspired to violent sedition must be locked up.
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