by Lloyd Billingsley
For carrying a “large wooden stick” on January 6 -- and for things the ex-officer said and believed.
Former police officer Thomas Robertson, who according to CBS News, “stormed the U.S. Capitol” on January 6, 2021, will spend more than seven years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
Robertson, 49, was charged with interfering with police officers and “entering a restricted area with a dangerous weapon, a large wooden stick.”
The seven-year sentence, handed down last Thursday, matches the longest prison term among the Jan. 6 cases to date. Its severity was not entirely the result of events on that day.
“You were not some bystander who just got swept up in the crowd,” said Obama judge Christopher Cooper. “It really seems as though you think of partisan politics as war and that you continue to believe these conspiracy theories.” As CBS reported, Robertson “clung to baseless conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from then-president Donald Trump.”
Judge Cooper also found it particularly “disturbing” that Robertson made militant comments after law enforcement officers were critically injured at the Capitol.
As the Washington Post noted, prosecutors “took the unusual step of publishing two detailed FBI investigations into the claims Robertson made in his appeal for mercy.” According to the FBI, Robertson could be guilty of a crime for using “stolen valor” for material benefit. Robertson’s attorneys told the court the wooden stick was a walking aid the defendant used after being shot in the thigh while working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan in 2011.
Judge Cooper said Robertson’s sentence is “a long time because it reflects the seriousness of the offenses that you were convicted of.” That could stand some independent cross-examination.
In Cooper’s own account, Robertson is being sentenced “for a long time” over things he said, and when he said them. According to the Obama judge, Roberston had made the troubling statements “after law enforcement officer officers were critically injured at the capitol,” a veiled reference to Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick.
On January 8, 2021, the New York Times charged that rioters had bludgeoned the officer to death with a fire extinguisher. In reality, there was no sign of injury and Sicknick died on January 7, 2021 of two strokes brought on by a blood clot. The Times disguised its correction as an “update” and attacked the reporting of Julie Kelly at American Greatness.
As Kelly noted, the January 6 committee continues to lie about Sicknick. Judge Cooper is on board with the falsehood, and observers have to wonder about his commitment to the First Amendment and free speech. Belief in a conspiracy theory is not a crime, and should not be a sentencing enhancement.
The court brought in the FBI to render judgment on Roberson’s appeal for mercy, but FBI stagecraft on January 6 seems to have escaped notice. Ten days before Robertson’s sentence, Guy Reffitt was sentenced to a similar lengthy term.
“Today’s sentence reflects the seriousness of the crimes committed by Mr. Reffitt, and underscores the wanton disregard he had for one of the pillars of our democracy—the peaceful transition of power,” said Steven M. D’Antuono, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI Washington Field Office.
As Julie Kelly has noted, agent D’Antuono was the prime player in the fake plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The FBI lost in court but D’Antuono was promoted to the FBI’s Washington Office.
On January 6, 2021, the doors of the Capitol were open and protesters invited in. So contrary to countless media reports, the protesters did not “storm the capital.”
The worst attack on the U.S. Capitol took place on November 7, 1983, when a far-left female-led domestic terrorist group bombed the building. As historian William Rosenau noted in Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol, the bombers were straight out of the Weather Underground and other leftist groups.
The January 6 Select Committee, with no representation for the accused, is straight of the Moscow show trials of the Stalin Era. As the late Sidney Hook noted in Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century, “the Moscow trials and the purges that followed them, were a turning point in the history of American liberalism, for it was irrevocably polarized by the controversies to which the trials gave rise.”
For the leftist faithful of the time, the accused old Bosheviks were guilty as charged and the trials were a model of fairness. The Democrats’ January 6 committee, and the trials that follow, give off a Stalinist stank all their own: withholding of evidence, punishment for statements and beliefs, and covert operations by the FBI, now the American KGB.
The leading champion of the Moscow show trials was Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who also covered up Stalin’s planned famine in Ukraine. With a false report that officer Sicknick was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher, and that the January 6 events were an armed insurrection, the Times replicates Duranty’s performance. So do media accounts that portray the trials of January 6 protesters as a model of fair treatment under the law.
On January 6, 2021, the only death by gunfire was unarmed U.S. Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, 35, shot down by Capitol Police officer Michel Byrd. The Department of Justice declined to pursue charges against Byrd and “closed the investigation into this matter.”
By contrast, Thomas Robertson gets seven years for carrying a wooden stick, for making certain statements, and for believing in “conspiracy theories.” For the January 6 political prisoners, it’s no justice and no peace.
Lloyd Billingsley
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/former-police-officer-gets-7-years-prison-jan-6-lloyd-billingsley/
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