Claim: 5 Capitol police died on January 6
A Dreadful Lie.
This lie is so grievous and disgusting it ranks as one of the outstandingly lowest and most grievous lies that I have ever had to fact check.
Trigger warning: this article discusses violence and suicide. If you are depressed and need to talk to someone in Australia call Lifeline 131114, more numbers on this page. In the US call the Samaritans on 988.
On January 6th, 2021, a group of protesters against the result of the 2020 Trump/Biden election whipped up and encouraged by FBI and Antifa plants in the crowd stormed into the Capitol building. This is not the first time and was not the last time that the Capitol and other US government buildings have been stormed by protesters.
The video above by Tucker Carlson, reporting on the lies subsequently told about January 6th that I’m reporting on here, shows short excerpts from ceremonies on January 6th 2022 at the White House and the Capitol; the statement Merrick B Garland issued says they are honouring five Capitol Police Officers who “responded selflessly on January 6 and who have since lost their lives: Officer Brian Sicknick, Officer Howard Liebengood, Officer Jeffrey Smith, Officer Gunther Hashida, and Officer Kyle DeFreytag.”
Like typical misinformation this statement, if you don’t carefully listen to the exact wording, seems to imply that these Officers died on January 6.
Biden said, in his typical confused ungrammatical babble, “Folks these people and the people representing those who couldn’t be here because they gave their lives for this did is incredibly consequential. That’s not political talk that’s historical fact.”
But the fact is that no Capitol Police officers died on January 6th.
Zero.
The only person to die during the riot was a woman, Ashlii Babbitt, a fourteen year army veteran who was protesting, and she was shot without the required warnings by a Capitol Police Officer, Michael Byrd.
This inversion of victim and persecutor is happening more and more in our societies. It is sick. The victim here was the protester, the offender was a Capitol Police Officer.
Despite Michael Byrd’s protestations in the NBC interview with him linked to below (it’s upsetting, don’t watch if it will upset you seeing video of Ashlii Babbitt dying ); but in that video of the event Michael Byrd is not heard at all making any warnings, indeed, he moves forward in a very intentional way and the only warning I can hear in the video is the warning of the protestor who is videoing, shouting, “There’s a gun! There’s a gun! There’s a gun!” when he saw that a masked man behind the barrier had a gun pointed at the rioters.
Brian Sicknick, who died the following day, was the only Capitol Police Officer for whom it was claimed at the time that he died as a result of conflict with the rioters. It was subsequently found by the Medical Examiner that he died of a stroke from natural causes.
The Capitol Police accepted the verdict of the Medical Examiner.
The New York Times published this article on Jan. 5, 2022 and updated it on Oct. 13, 2022; they basically lie about Brian Sicknick’s death; particularly in the link they provide where they say nothing about the autopsy or the actual cause of death; they simply imply that there are new questions, which is not entirely accurate; in fact it is quite inaccurate, he died of a stroke.
But they also report two other officers who unfortunately killed themselves.
•Officer Brian D. Sicknick of the Capitol Police, who was attacked by the mob, died on Jan. 7.
•Officer Jeffrey Smith of the Metropolitan Police Department killed himself after the attack.
•Officer Howard S. Liebengood of the Capitol Police also died by suicide four days afterward.
The fact that these two Capitol Police Officers committed suicide means that the possibility exists that they felt mortally ashamed for being part of a police action they fundamentally disagreed with.
No one in the riots killed these Officers, they did not die as a result of injuries sustained in the riots or anything the rioters did.
The other two Capitol Police Officers who died, Gunther Hashida and Kyle DeFreytag, also died by suicide.
What does this cause of death say?
It tells us of deep regret.
They did not die as a result of the actions of the protesters.
Suicide is not the answer to regret.
Shame and regret, by the way, does not need to lead to death: rather, repentance, changing your mind, turning to God for forgiveness, is the way to life.
Friends, none of us need to despair because of regret about what we’ve done in the past.
Jesus died for our sins, and all of those sins and the guilt of them in God’s sight can be wiped away, simply by turning to God and asking for forgiveness.
This is the only way to find peace.
And now I rejoice, not because you were made sorrowful, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you felt the sorrow that God had intended, and so were not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation without regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. 2 Corinthians 7:10
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:9
Also, one of the best and most helpful (and rather paradoxical) arguments against suicide I ever heard was this phrase, spoken by an inmate in a concentration camp to a fellow inmate, who was thinking of ending it all by trying to climb the fence and being shot: don’t you want to find out how your story ended? Don’t you want to know if you survived, if you eventually got free?
Addendum: William Evans
Biden also mentions Capitol Police Officer William Evans whom he claimed died due to “threats by these sick insurrectionists that continued to be profligated on the internet…. William Evans was killed defending the Capitol because of this God-awful sick threats.”
William Evans was actually killed in April 2021, three months after the so-called insurrection, when Nation of Islam supporter Noah Green rammed him with his car.
Rosanne Boyland
Rosanne Boyland died on the day as well. She was trampled by the crowd. The New York Post recounted the CBS46 interview with Justin Winchell, the friend she was with:
The friend she was with, Justin Winchell, recalled her final moments as protesters began falling over one another.
“I put my arm underneath her and was pulling her out and then another guy fell on top of her, and another guy was just walking [on top of her],” Winchell told CBS46. “There were people stacked two, three deep … people just crushed.”
He said the clash “basically created a panic, and the police in turn push[ed] back on them, so people started falling.”
Paramedics tried to revive Boyland, 34, but she died.
“I lost a dear, dear friend, an amazing friend,” said Winchell, who drove with Boyland to DC to hear the president speak.
Winchell said he didn’t believe President Trump bore responsibility for his pal’s death.
“She was killed by an incited event and it was not incited by Trump supporters,” he said.
Trump
Trump urged his supporters to stay peaceful. In his speech, he said, “We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
While detractors point out that he also said they had to fight like hell: “Our brightest days are before us, our greatest achievements still wait. I think one of our great achievements will be election security because nobody, until I came along, had any idea how corrupt our elections were. And again, most people would stand there at 9:00 in the evening and say, ‘I want to thank you very much,’ and they go off to some other life, but I said, ‘Something’s wrong here. Something’s really wrong. Can’t have happened.’ And we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more,” however he followed that up with the tweet, “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”
Subsequent Release of exonerating footage on Tucker Carlson March 8 2023
Footage of the January 6th protests shows people peacefully milling around, lining up for tours, and the so-called “Qanon Shaman” Jacob Chansley, who was later sentenced to 41 months in prison for his presence in the building, being shown around the Capitol building by the Capitol police.
It also shows Brian Sicknick walking around completely fine after being supposedly mortally injured and then collapsing according to various news reports that have not been corrected.
News media response
What one can tell from the mainstream media response to Tucker Carlson’s released footage is that the thing they are most worried about is losing Brian Sicknick as a symbol for the ‘insurrection’, because they spend the most time in their reports trying rather unsuccessfully to debunk Tucker Carlson’s footage of Brian Sicknick walking around, perfectly well, after he has supposedly been beaten half to death.
FIRST FACT CHECK HALL OF FAME
News media should already know this: Brian Sicknick’s death was ruled natural in the autopsy.
NBC is the most honest and put a paragraph at the end of the earlier story pointing out the facts.
Forbes at least reports that the autopsy showed no evidence of blunt force trauma:
FIRST FACT CHECK HALL OF DISINFORMATION INFAMY
But while NBC are reporting on this story, they are not really engaging with any of Tucker Carlson’s points in any way, shape or form, instead spinning the whole thing:
NPR still has the incorrect story available with no updates or corrections that comes up on Brave on the first page (note links go to archive.is to catch the story as of today 8 March 2023)
CNN has not corrected their earlier report either, and it came up on the first page of the Brave search I did:
Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick died Thursday night “due to injuries sustained while on-duty,” Capitol Police said in a statement. He was one of five people who died in the violence.
Sicknick was injured while physically engaging with the rioters and collapsed after returning to his division office, the statement said.
“He was taken to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries,” the Capitol Police statement said.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/08/us/brian-sicknick-death/index.html
It is worth looking at the CNN coverage of Tucker Carlson to see the spin happening already.
For instance CNN admits that Sicknick died of natural causes, but tries to place the blame on him being sprayed with pepper spray by protesters:
On January 6, Sicknick was attacked with pepper spray and physically fought with members of the mob. An officer testified that she saw Sicknick in significant distress after he was sprayed. He died one day later after suffering a series of strokes. The DC medical examiner ruled that Sicknick died of natural causes but said, “all that transpired (on January 6) played a role in his condition.”
They neglect to mention that the autopsy found no evidence of blunt force trauma.
Indeed, to CNN it’s all a narrative; in this paragraph they are acknowledging here that they believe the postmodernist lie that there is no truth, but that everything is simply spin:
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy once spoke about the violence at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, in starkly different terms than the narrative Fox News host Tucker Carlson is presenting with footage McCarthy provided to him, which has been selectively used to downplay the violence.
It is quite sickening – clearly Kevin McCarthy no longer believes this ‘narrative’ completely, because it is he who opened up the footage for Tucker Carlson to go through it.
NBC goes into mockery that unfortunately brings to mind the fact that if Tucker Carlson is spin, there are much more ridiculous and grievous examples of spin.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/politics/jan-6-capitol-deaths.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/us/politics/capitol-police-howard-liebengood-dies.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/us/police-suicides-capitol-riot.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/us/politics/capitol-police-howard-liebengood-dies.html
https://news.yahoo.com/biden-congress-honor-jan-6-171600928.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-protests-idUSKBN1JO173
https://www.newsweek.com/john-sullivan-capitol-attack-leftwing-antifa-1561898
https://thepostmillennial.com/i-orchestrated-it-ray-epps-texted-his-nephew-on-jan-6-report
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/11/full-transcript-donald-trump-january-6-incendiary-speech
https://nypost.com/2021/01/08/rosanne-boyland-woman-killed-in-dc-riots-was-trampled-by-crowd/