Next week, the private golf club that former President Donald Trump owns in club in Bedminster, New Jersey, is scheduled to host a “J6 Awards Gala” to celebrate not the people who defended the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but the people who attacked it.
Trump isn’t expected to attend, according to reports, even though the Stand in the Gap Foundation, the organization that’s behind the event, boasts that it’s invited him to speak. But Trump doesn’t have to speak for us to link him to this event. It’s being held at a property he owns, and he has been very vocal in his support of the people who brutally attacked police officers in an assault on the Capitol. Last year, he spoke at a fundraiser held at the same golf course in support of the insurrectionists, and he’s hailed the attackers as “patriots” and vowed to pardon them, including those “who assaulted officers.”
Trump doesn’t have to speak for us to link him to this event. It’s being held at a property he owns, and he has been vocal in his support of people who attacked police in an assault on the Capitol.
And even if he isn’t there Sept. 5, the event’s website promises speaking appearances from Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and former adviser Peter Navarro, who served three months in jail for refusing to comply with the House Jan. 6 committee’s investigation.
According to the event’s website, “the J6 Awards Gala … will honor and celebrate the twenty defendants who contributed to the powerful ‘Justice For All’ song” and celebrate “all J6 defendants who have shown incredible courage and sacrifice.”
A presidential candidate letting his property be used to host an event where a mob attack on police officers will be celebrated as heroic is blood-boiling.
As for the “Justice for All” song, which Trump has his supporters stand for at his rallies, we know the identities of many of the singers from a May 2023 Washington Post report:
Texan Ryan Nichols, according to the Department of Justice, drove to the Capitol based on the “belief that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.” Nichols, who pleaded guilty to two felonies, including assaulting law enforcement officers, was wearing body armor as he “delivered two streams” of pepper spray “hitting multiple law enforcement officers.” Nichols also urged his fellow attackers to enter the Capitol with him, and yelled, “If you have a weapon, you need to get your weapon!” He was sentenced to five years in prison.
Before he traveled from Texas to the Capitol, Shane Jenkins, another Texan, posted, “I have some sog tomahawks and tactical blades can I take those?” on social media. He was convicted at trial of eight felony charges and sentenced to seven years. Prosecutors say he pulled a “Sog” brand metal tomahawk axe out of his bag during the siege and used it to break windows. He then “riled up the crowd, telling other rioters, “Bro, we’re going in that f— building one way or another” and “We paid for it; it’s our f— building.” Prosecutors say he “hurled nine different objects at the officers” protecting Congress that day.
Officer Brian Sicknick was one of the people pepper-sprayed by Julian Khater. Sicknick died the next day.
Officer Brian Sicknick was one of the people pepper-sprayed by Julian Khater, another one of the singers of the “Justice for All” song. Khater pleaded guilty to “assaulting law enforcement officers with pepper spray, causing bodily injury to the officers.” Sicknick died the next day.
Sarah McAbee, the organizer of this J6 awards gala, is married to Ronald Colton McAbee, a former Tennessee sheriff’s deputy who was sentenced to nearly six years in prison for assaulting police officers with “reinforced knuckle gloves.” Even more despicably, McAbee held down a police officer who’d been “knocked to the ground, kicked and stripped of his baton by other rioters,” enabling the crowd to viciously beat him.
Not only are these the people Trump has promised to pardon and the people whose rendition of the national anthem he thinks deserves applause, they’re the people who’ll be celebrated and valorized at Trump National Golf Club.
The Jan. 6 attack — as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves said when he testified before Congress in January — was “likely the largest single-day, mass assault of law enforcement officers in our nation’s history.” Graves made it clear that many more than the 140 officers originally reported suffered physical injuries that day — which, as he added, does not even include the scores more who suffered mental trauma. And we’ve horrifically seen several officers die of suicide in connection with what they endured on Jan 6.
What Trump is doing and has done is not “treason,” at least not according to the letter of the law. But he has repeatedly provided “aid and comfort” to those who waged the first violent attack on our Capitol since the war of 1812, when the British set it on fire. Trump doesn’t belong back in the White House; he belongs in a prison cell just like the people who will be celebrated next week at the awful Jan 6 gala at his country club.
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