(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Trump campaign blames Jan. 6 violence on everyone except Donald Trump [1] ['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-15 That Trump has yet to be charged in connection with Jan. 6, while hundreds of everyday people who followed his instructions have been is beyond disappointing. It’s a surrender of the idea that no one is beyond the law and an open invitation to the next political figure who wants to make a go at overturning the government. Of course, it’s not unusual for Trump to be blaming someone else for his own actions. Trump is the king of never accepting responsibility for anything, ever. However, with his campaign/fundraising scam getting back into the ring, Trump is determined that nothing about the insurrection he started should stick to him going into the new cycle. Instead, Trump’s campaign cranked out a statement—one that puts the blame for everything that happened on Jan. 6 squarely where it belongs: Twitter. Recently, it was shockingly revealed that Twitter colluded with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to Rig and Steal the 2020 Presidential Election in favor of Joe Biden, and to deplatform and illegally censor me. This is, of course, the “Twitter Files” conspiracy theory that Republicans used to justify a Congressional hearing last week—a hearing at which multiple Republicans leveled exactly the charges Trump is now making, with exactly the same amount of evidence. Which is zero. The entirety of the Twitter Files is a set of carefully edited and limited intercompany communications that show employees of Twitter, and especially those charged with moderating the conversation there, debating how to handle tweets deemed to be promoting violence, those calling for the obstruction of Congress, and those repeating lies about the 2020 election results. At the center of that conversation is Trump’s own Twitter account, which did plenty of all three. What’s absolutely not in those files, in any shape or form, is any evidence that anything that happened at Twitter was in any way connected to the FBI or DOJ. None. The FBI did not hint, lean on, advise, or send encrypted Morse code messages to anyone at Twitter on any matter to do with Jan. 6. It’s all a lie. Lying is second nature to Trump, but in this case he was helped by having everyone from Jim Jordan to Marjorie Taylor Greene lubricate the public lie chute by repeating this absolutely false statement in Congress, almost uniformly in a way that gave Twitter employees absolutely no chance to respond. As The Washington Post reports, Trump then extends his statement with claims that he tried to stop the violence with a pair of tweets delivered on the afternoon of Jan. 6. According to Trump, his blocked account and the “unselect committee” on Jan. 6 tried to hide his posts. Except that’s not the problem. The first problem is that the first of these tweets appeared at 2:38 PM, well after the violence was underway and Trump supporters had beaten, broken, and smashed their way into the Capitol. Even more importantly, it came less than five minutes after Trump tweeted this: Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth! Somehow, that tweet was left out of Trump’s big mea-definitely-not-culpa statement. It would be days before Twitter decided to suspend Trump’s account, meaning that no one had any issue with seeing his tweets on that day. No one has the mistaken impression that anything he had to say about the riots was hidden. The issue for Trump is that most Americans have the perfectly accurate impression that what he said only encouraged the violence. Trump doesn’t stop with just pointing the finger at a mythical conspiracy between Twitter and the FBI. He also tags some of those most responsible for the violence on Jan. 6 … like Rep. Maxine Waters, and … oh, other Democrats. Who spread “horrible and hate-filled words and violence” without any repercussion. He doesn’t provide any examples of the violence, or even of the hate-filled words. But then, examples aren’t really necessary. In fact, not having them in there is important. After all, when you’re trying to get people to look at everyone except the guilty party, you want them searching as long as possible. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/15/2153156/-Trump-campaign-blames-Jan-6-violence-on-everyone-except-Donald-Trump Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/