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Two days earlier than former President Donald J. Trump was booked at an Atlanta jail on his fourth indictment, he held an occasion at his golf membership in New Jersey for an additional group of individuals going through felony prices: rioters accused of storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Standing subsequent to a portrait of himself portrayed as James Bond, Mr. Trump instructed the defendants and their households that they’d suffered enormously, however that each one of that may change if he gained one other time period.
“People who’ve been handled unfairly are going to be handled extraordinarily, extraordinarily pretty,” he mentioned to a spherical of applause on the occasion final August in Bedminster, N.J. “What you’ve suffered is simply ridiculous,” he added. “But it’s going to be OK.”
That personal occasion was emblematic of how Mr. Trump has embraced dozens of Jan. 6 defendants and their kin and highlights how he has sought to undermine legislation enforcement when it fits him, whereas he additionally places forth a law-and-order marketing campaign.
Recently, nonetheless, his celebrations of the Capitol riot and people who took half in it have turn into extra public as he has promoted a revisionist historical past of the assault and positioned it on the coronary heart of his 2024 presidential marketing campaign.
Despite the almost 1,000 responsible pleas and convictions which have been secured in felony circumstances stemming from Jan. 6, Mr. Trump has repeatedly described the rioters who broke into the Capitol as “hostages” and has began to open his marketing campaign occasions with a recording of riot defendants singing the nationwide anthem from their jail cells.
He has highlighted the work of the so-called Freedom Corner, a vigil of activists and rioters’ relations who’ve gathered almost nightly for nearly two years outdoors the jail in Washington the place among the most violent rioters are being held. This yr, when it appeared as if Mr. Trump would go on trial in Washington on prices associated to Jan. 6, his aides mentioned the thought of him visiting that jail, based on an individual conversant in the discussions who was not approved to talk publicly. The plan was delay after the trial was delayed.
By doing all of this, Mr. Trump has risked radicalizing his most die-hard supporters even additional, encouraging them to repeat occasions like people who unfolded on Jan. 6.
“It normalizes violence as a official resolution to political grievances,” mentioned Robert Pape, a scholar on the University of Chicago who has studied American political violence within the wake of the Capitol assault. “And so it makes it extra probably that politically indignant individuals will resort to it.”
Trump Makes the Capitol Attack a General Election Issue
Most politicians would probably have prevented specializing in an episode that shocked the nation as Jan. 6 did, and that polling constantly has proven alienates swing voters. But Mr. Trump has paid more and more extra consideration to Jan. 6 in his normal election marketing campaign.
Mr. Trump’s consideration to Jan. 6 has offered President Biden with a political alternative. Mr. Biden lately invited two Capitol Police officers who had been attacked by the mob to talk at one in every of his personal marketing campaign occasions. As a part of his message of searching for to guard democracy, he has repeatedly described the assault on the Capitol as one of many nation’s darkest days.
“Trump mentioned that there was ‘a number of love’ on January the sixth,” Mr. Biden mentioned in a January speech at Valley Forge, Pa. “The remainder of the nation, together with legislation enforcement, noticed a number of hate and violence.”
Still, Mr. Trump has an extended historical past of making alternate variations of actuality when it really works to his benefit. And as he has struggled to increase his voting coalition over three campaigns, he appears to have acknowledged that points surrounding Jan. 6 encourage his base. The topic has helped him strengthen the bond he shares along with his supporters by portray them as he likes to color himself — as victims of a federal legislation enforcement system run amok.
“I do assume he’s sincerely involved about us and our households, and I don’t assume he’s doing it only for political causes,” mentioned Will Pope of Kansas, who attended the Bedminster occasion and has been accused of, amongst different issues, jamming a flagpole into the Senate carriage doorways because the police had been making an attempt to shut them.
“He’s picked up on the rising concern concerning the Justice Department and the federal government typically going arduous towards American residents,” he added.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s marketing campaign, mentioned the Justice Department below Mr. Biden had spent extra time prosecuting Jan. 6 defendants and Mr. Trump than “criminals, unlawful immigrants and terrorists.” She added, “President Trump will restore justice for all Americans who’ve been unfairly handled by Joe Biden’s two-tier system of justice.”
How Trump Has Flipped on the Capitol Riot
Mr. Trump hasn’t all the time embraced Jan. 6 — not less than not brazenly.
Prodded by his advisers, he publicly disavowed the assault inside days of the Capitol being stormed, despite the fact that behind closed doorways he strongly resisted saying the election was over, based on the House choose committee that investigated the assault.
Soon, nonetheless, Mr. Trump started to echo the rising makes an attempt to revise the historical past of the Capitol assault. In doing so, he usually adopted the lead of far-right lawmakers, together with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who had been in flip following the lead of a small however vocal group of right-wing journalists and activists.
Mr. Trump’s embrace of Jan. 6 not solely has meant describing the assault wherein greater than 100 law enforcement officials had been injured as a “love fest.” It additionally has led him to inform a journalist that he needed to march to the Capitol that day however that his staff had prevented him from doing so.
At a rally in Texas in January 2022, Mr. Trump, whereas teasing his eventual presidential bid, mentioned he would think about pardoning these concerned within the assault if he had been re-elected — a promise he has usually repeated.
A pivotal second in Mr. Trump’s reversal on the assault got here six months later.
In July 2022, one in every of his aides, Liz Harrington, reached out to Julie Kelly, a conservative journalist who has written extensively concerning the Capitol assault and the defendants charged with collaborating in it.
Ms. Harrington requested what Mr. Trump might do “to bail these individuals out,” Ms. Kelly recalled. She replied that whereas there was little he might do about their bail, Mr. Trump ought to educate himself concerning the bigger authorized points surrounding Jan. 6. Ms. Kelly proposed a gathering with Cynthia Hughes, the founding father of the Patriot Freedom Project, a outstanding Jan. 6 authorized protection fund.
Mr. Trump’s aides initially balked on the concept of sitting down with Ms. Hughes, Ms. Kelly recalled. Ms. Hughes’s nephew, Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, was going through prices stemming from the Capitol assault, however he was additionally an avowed Nazi sympathizer who preferred to take photos of himself dressed as Hitler.
In the top, nonetheless, Ms. Kelly and Ms. Hughes had been granted an viewers with Mr. Trump at Bedminster in September 2022. Ms. Kelly mentioned that she instructed the previous president he was not doing sufficient to assist the Jan. 6 defendants and that they felt deserted by him. The two girls additionally instructed Mr. Trump that among the federal judges he had placed on the bench had been “among the many worst” when it got here to dealing with the tons of of felony circumstances stemming from the Capitol assault.
After the assembly, Mr. Trump gave $10,000 to Ms. Hughes’s group. Around the identical time, he instructed the conservative radio host Wendy Bell, “I’m financially supporting individuals which might be unbelievable, and so they had been in my workplace really two days in the past.” Mr. Trump later gave a video assertion of assist at one of many group’s fund-raising occasions at a resort in Washington.
“People have been handled unconstitutionally, in my view, and really, very unfairly, and we’re going to unravel it,” he mentioned within the video.
Mr. Trump additionally referred to as Micki Witthoeft, the mom of Ashli Babbitt, a rioter who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police lieutenant on Jan. 6 and who’s seen by many on the fitting as a sort of political martyr.
“He mentioned he talks about Ashli and he thinks about Ashli and that he has her on his coronary heart,” Ms. Witthoeft mentioned in an online video, in which she recounted the call with Mr. Trump at one in every of her nightly protests on the Freedom Corner.
Mr. Trump’s aides and congressional allies, like Ms. Taylor Greene, additionally obtained him interested by what they described because the poor circumstances that Jan. 6 defendants had been dwelling below within the Washington jail. But these circumstances lengthy preceded the arrival of the rioters, and at this level the jail homes solely about 15 or 20 them.
By that time, Mr. Trump had employed Joanna Miller Wischer, a former aide to Peter Navarro, who was beforehand Mr. Trump’s White House commerce adviser and is now in jail for contempt of Congress as a result of he defied a subpoena from the Jan. 6 House committee. Ms. Wischer, whose involvement with Mr. Trump’s political motion committee was first reported by the information group Semafor, quickly turned an advocate of types throughout the marketing campaign for Jan. 6 rioters.
Another challenge helped to form Mr. Trump’s ideas on the Capitol assault and people who took half in it: the spectacle of the televised hearings that had been held all through that summer time and fall by the Jan. 6 House committee. Mr. Trump was livid, based on an individual with direct data of his considering, as he watched a number of of his former aides testify in public about his incapability to confess defeat within the 2020 election and his inactivity within the face of the violence on Jan. 6.
How the Jan. 6 Prisoners Became ‘Hostages’
Mr. Trump’s use of the time period “hostages” to explain these charged with collaborating within the Capitol assault has been one in every of his most outlandish makes an attempt to change the historical past of Jan. 6. The phrase, not less than as he has used it, expresses little past a baseless and distorted view that anybody who has been touched by the felony justice system due to their roles within the riot has been handled unfairly.
During the Justice Department’s huge investigation of the Capitol assault, the variety of defendants jailed earlier than their trials has tended to hover round 5 or 10 % of the entire quantity charged. But that quantity has decreased considerably in latest months.
And the defendants jailed earlier than their trials had been among the many most violent rioters, accused of taking pictures a pistol within the air whereas standing on scaffolding above the mob, plotting to homicide the F.B.I. brokers who investigated them and different severe crimes.
One of Mr. Trump’s associates mentioned they realized that the previous president began to make use of the time period “hostages” within the months after he recorded a model of the “Star-Spangled Banner” with the so-called Jan. 6 Choir, a musical group composed of rioters serving time within the Washington jail. Mr. Trump has insisted on taking part in the track at a few of his rallies and has additionally performed it at instances at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence, the place, in some circumstances, diners on the patio rise through the show and put their arms over their hearts.
One of the recording’s producers was Kash Patel, an in depth aide to Mr. Trump who served in a high Defense Department position within the ultimate days of his administration. Through a spokesman, Mr. Patel denied that he had any position in persuading Mr. Trump to make use of the phrase “hostages” in his speeches.
Last month at a marketing campaign occasion in Ohio, Mr. Trump stood by as an announcer requested the group to rise for “the horribly and unfairly handled January sixth hostages.” Then, after saluting as a recording performed, Mr. Trump repeated the phrase.
“You see the spirit from the hostages, and that’s the place they’re, is hostages,” Mr. Trump mentioned, including that the boys had been additionally “unbelievable patriots.”
Several critics, together with some federal judges who’ve dealt with Jan. 6-related circumstances, have mentioned that legitimizing the occasions of that day elevated the danger that one thing related might occur once more.
A outstanding judge in Washington, Royce C. Lamberth, earlier this month, whereas sentencing a person who assaulted the police on Jan. 6 to greater than seven years in jail, apprehensive aloud about Jan. 6 changing into “a precedent for additional violence towards political opponents or governmental establishments.”
“This isn’t regular,” Judge Lamberth mentioned. “This can not turn into regular. We as a group, we as a society, we as a rustic can not condone the normalization of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.”
Michael Gold contributed reporting.
