Going full Soviet: Judge releases Jan. 6 defendant on bond after he renounces Trump By Monica Showalter
The jailing of the Jan. 6 riot defendants is not just an obvious miscarriage of justice, given the length of time they’ve spent in detention without trial. It’s also turning into something that’s full Soviet.
Here’s the latest from one Judge Amy B. Jackson, who, after denying release at least once to one guy, went ahead and let him out. He’s a Buffalo, New York-based defendant named Thomas Sibnick, who’s recanted:
WASHINGTON — A federal judge reversed her bond decision Tuesday for a Capitol riot defendant accused of robbing a D.C. Police officer — in part because she found “toxic” conditions in the D.C. Jail were likely to contribute to his further radicalization if he was kept in pretrial detention.
U.S. District Judge Amy B. Jackson released Thomas Sibick, 35, released to his parents’ Buffalo, New York, home under 24-hour incarceration on Tuesday after hearing from his lawyer and a tearful plea from his father, Dr. Eugene Sibick, a former officer with the U.S. Navy who publicly criticized his son’s detention at the “Justice for J6” rally in September and has called him a “political prisoner.”
A good thread of what went down, with far more relevant details from WUSA reporter Jordan Fischer, was retweeted by journalist Glenn Greenwald and is worth reading here.
The reason he got out while the others stayed in?
His groveling letter denouncing President Trump, which was so self-abasing that it would make Nikolai Bukharin blush:
“While many praise Trump, I loathe him, his words and actions are nefarious causing pain and harm to the world,” Sibick wrote. “He is not a leader and should be ostracized from any political future, what he honestly needs to do is go away!”
That didn’t seem to be his point of view back on Jan. 6, when he was allegedly assaulting a police officer and stealing his badge, according to the charges. He certainly was some kind of nut and probably had more legal problems than the other defendants, who were simply in the wrong place or who were pushed into the Capitol, possibly by the FBI’s paid agents provocateurs, or who were invited in by Capitol cops and waved the flag. He probably ought to be punished.
The main reason Jackson let him out was that she bought Sibnick’s defense attorney’s argument that he needed to be “saved” from “radicalization” from other defendants and because he was supposedly so young and suggestible.
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Throughout his letter to the judge, Sibick writes of being young and impressionable and at 35 says he’s finally starting to change and grow up — which is a little queasy-making, but probably a typical legal defense from a guy who doesn’t have much else.
Among other things, though, his problem was his politics rather than his judgment. He’d watched too much Fox News, which “could inflame his thoughts“:
Judge Jackson: “He came here fired up about the stolen election. Where was he getting his information? Facebook? The news?”
To point to Fox for his actions is full-blown nonsense. Fox News, recall, called Arizona for Biden before the votes were counted, and retains significant numbers of NeverTrumps, including Paul Ryan on its board, as well as among many of its anchor staff. Whatever got into this guy’s head to participate in the Capitol riot didn’t exactly come from Fox News, let alone Trump, who’s on record calling for peaceful protest. It was something stupid he did.
Her stipulation on this phony theme was this:
“I’m not going to order that he not watch Fox News; I’m going to order that you turn off the talk shows, period. No MSNBC either,” Jackson said. “I’m trying to make sure it’s a calm environment. And I’m looking to you to make sure of that.”
Ah, she covered her tracks, being even-handed and all. One wonders if that’s a lifetime order, to ensure he stays quiet and low-information, and ignorant and malleable, as the left desires of all conservatives. She actually thinks he committed his acts because of Fox.
The bigger problem is that the idiot made a “confession,” professing that he had changed his views and created propaganda for the Democrats. That’s what got him out. He also likely created harsher conditions for the defendants who remain unlawfully detained without trial, nearly nine months out from the incident, still waiting for a lot of unreleased video evidence (which makes the government’s case against many of them fall flat), who still have no charges. Nobody charged with treason yet, because the reality is, this was a crowd control issue for the most part. But a convenient propaganda pawn for Democrats, well, he gets out.
Funny how it happens that the ones who get out happen to be the ones who denounce Trump.
This Sibnick case, while egregious, is not the first.
There was also the old grandma from some place like Minnesota several months earlier whose name escapes me — she’d been imprisoned on Jan. 6 and wrote a letter renouncing her previous views and got let out on those grounds.
Jackson, in fact, seems obsessed with what the Jan. 6 defendants think rather than what they did, which has nothing to do with her job as a judge.
Here she is wandering off the reservation and editorializing on this group of defendants’ views:
Jackson slammed Dresch’s views as “misguided,” noting that judge after judge smacked down the former president’s claims of election fraud.
Really? Does it matter what their views are, or is it her job to pay attention to what they did?
Do we hear her asking such questions of Antifa-supporters or Black Lives Matter looters? Don’t think so.
There is zero legal basis for her statements, which are solid political opinion, and which she in her quest for power seeks to make into written law. Perhaps her obsession with defendants’ views is a function of the fact that the government has such a flimsy case against them.
So now we see the creepy Bukharin situation. Defendants are unjustly jailed for extended periods for merely trespassing, with some creating mayhem. Now, suddenly…their thoughts have changed. Suddenly, they’re good little establishment leftists.
It definitely makes you admire the ones who’ve refused to do that and despise the weaklings who’d say anything to get out, but the big issue is — is this the United States?
It’s like the Soviet Union. We all recall how dissidents were imprisoned in psychiatric institutions if not the hard-labor Soviet Gulag for having the “wrong” thoughts, or more specifically “failing to recognize Soviet reality.”
That happened a lot in the late Soviet era, but its rationale dated from Lenin, as this academic paper on Soviet abuse of psychiatry titled “Medicine Standing on Its Head” shows:
Lenin asserted that individual psychology and behavior was the product of social experience, and that “true cognition is an adequate reflection of reality, and social practice is the criterion of truth.”[9] Thus, a mentally healthy citizen was one whose behavior reflected the truth of the Soviet reality. Early Soviet psychiatrists appropriated this Marxist-Leninist understanding of consciousness as the foundation for psychotherapeutic and psychiatric treatment.
Sometimes in the Soviet Union, they’d get let out when they professed the “right” thoughts, given that this happened in the creepy dry-rot Brezhnev era, and then serve as Soviet propaganda. Other times, as in the case of the hapless Bukharin, who professed his love for communism and Stalin at his 1938 show trial, despite admitting to being a “degenerate fascist” working for the “restoration of capitalism,” it didn’t work so well. Bukharin groveled like nobody’s business to get out alive and got shot anyway.
What we are seeing now is that exact same dynamic: letting them out from their still chimeric non-charges in many cases if they promise to change their politics. That’s full-blown Soviet. What’s wrong with this picture?
Image: Wikipedia, public domain.
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