Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has released a statement clarifying that he can’t actually clarify his stance on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. He hasn’t examined the evidence, many people are telling him many things, both sides have made arguments, and someone should really look into it.
After days of doing damage control over a fundraising email in which his campaign referred to the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 as “J6 activists,” Kennedy released a lengthy statement “to clarify his views” on the attack, but somehow failed to provide any sort of clarity.
“January 6 is one of the most polarizing topics on the political landscape. I am listening to people of diverse viewpoints on it in order to make sense of the event and what followed. I want to hear every side,” Kennedy wrote.
“I have not examined the evidence in detail, but reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there is little evidence of a true insurrection,” he added, without naming who exactly was feeding him the pro-insurrectionist, anti-Trump viewpoint. “They observe that the protestors carried no weapons, had no plans or ability to seize the reins of government, and that Trump himself had urged them to protest ‘peacefully.’” In reality, there were weapons in the Capitol, a Missouri man was sentenced on Friday for carrying a semi-automatic pistol into the building during the riot. There was a plot to seize the reins of government, it infamously required the cooperation of former Vice President Mike Pence, who was threatened with summary execution by the rioters when he refused to entertain the ploy.
“Like many reasonable Americans, I am concerned about the possibility that political objectives motivated the vigor of the prosecution of the J6 defendants, their long sentences, and their harsh treatment. That would fit a disturbing pattern of the weaponization of government agencies — the DoJ, the IRS, the SEC, the FBI, etc. — against political opponents.”
Kennedy added: “One can, as I do, oppose Donald Trump and all he stands for, and still be disturbed by the weaponization of government against him.”
The claim that the Jan. 6 riot was not actually an attempted insurrection but an unfortunate case of well-meaning tourists getting a little too comfortable in the Capitol is a lie. It’s a lie that has been heavily promoted by prominent right-wing politicians and commentators hellbent on ensuring that government officials who pushed false claims of election fraud in the aftermath of the 2020 election avoid any form of accountability — and so far they’ve been very successful.
The attack on the Capitol caused over $3 million in damages to the complex, injured over 170 law enforcement officials, resulted in multiple deaths and suicides, and almost prevented the certification of President Joe Biden’s election. But for Kennedy, who regularly trafficks in the sort of conspiracies now ubiquitous among the right, it’s not actually a matter of rigorous evidentiary examination (there’s been plenty of it in the last four years) but of political expediency.
Kennedy has carved out a niche for himself within the 2024 presidential contest by elevating himself, with a helpful boost from right-wing media, as first and foremost a disaffected Democrat being persecuted by the Biden administration over his political views. Earlier this week, Kennedy repeatedly emphasized his belief that Biden is a greater “threat to democracy” than Trump. His reasoning largely rests on accusations that Biden is using “federal agencies to censor political speech, to censor his opponent.” In his media blitz surrounding the statements, Kennedy blamed the Biden administration for social media companies’ policies against the spread of vaccine misinformation, a hallmark of Kennedy’s career.
It’s no wonder Kennedy finds himself unable to unequivocally condemn an attack on the Capitol when he can’t even bring himself to say that the man who attempted to overturn his presidential election loss is the primary threat to democracy among his opponents. Instead, Kennedy said on Friday that as president he would “appoint a special counsel — an individual respected by all sides — to investigate whether prosecutorial discretion was abused for political ends,” in the case of Jan. 6.
Kennedy added that both “establishment parties are using J6 to pour fuel on the fire of America’s divisions,” but everything else in Kennedy’s non-clarification reads like a summary of Republicans’ revisionism over the riot.
